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CarbonScape

Title: CarbonScape
Artist: Chris Cheung
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): audio, visual, installation
Issue(s): carbon pollution

CarbonScape by Chris Cheung is of particular salience for this project in that it sonifies carbon pollution data, while also visibilising it.  The work is an 18-track ambient sound installation, whereby the artist draws upon environmental pollution data and uses it to manipulate sounds of sampled car and aircraft engines, along with other built environmental sounds such as air conditioning and noise from factories.1 Cheung uses an environmental dataset of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from NOAA, which confirms that the levels of co2 ‘have reached the highest levels seen in the past three million years’(ibid.).

For the installation itself, black spheres are placed in transparent tubes. The representation of the increasing co2 levels is achieved in a twofold manner. First, the intensity of the sound levels, ie. engine and industrial noise, increases over time. This is synchronised with the visual representation of increase, through the black balls rising through the transparent tubes.

For the purposes of this project, CarbonScape both visibilises and sonifies a well-established and respected environmental dataset. Furthermore, while not tacticle per se, the embodiment of the audience within the work makes it also a potentially visceral and tactile experience.

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BioSoNot 1.2 / 2.0


Title: BioSoNot 1.2 / 2.0
Artist(s): Gilberto Esparza
Source: WMMNA
Sense(s): sound
Issue(s): river pollution

In this piece, the artist created a sound installation that incorporates sensor data from rivers. The sensors collected various data parameters such as the activity of bacteria in the river, river pH, temperature, amongst others. 1 Concerned about the levels of pollution in Mexican rivers, Esparza wished to ‘sonify’ this data. To this end he created a machine that would turn the sensor data collected, into analogue signals that could then be sounded. Furthermore, the device also cleaned the water as it worked, providing an ecological restoration service as it was at once rendering manifest the pollution to an audience.

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Insect Songs

Title: Insect Songs
Artist(s): Ursula Damm, Christina Meissner, Teresa Carasco
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): sound
Issue(s): biodiversity loss

Insect Songs is a work for Cello by artists Ursula Damm, Christina Meissner and Teresa Carrasco.

This work interrogates species decline by engaging in a performative work that interacted with, and caused a species of midge, the chironomous riparius to swarm. As Damm describes of the inspiration behind the piece:

When I left the county side and moved to a city I begun to miss the sound of the fields and the forrest. And when I later returned to the small village in the middle of vineyards, called Diedesfeld, something was gone. I took me a while to figure out that I missed the sounds of insects. And that this sound was like a confirmation of a strong, ecological balance. Science proofed only years later that insecticides diminished insects up to 80 % of their former presence.1

The key affordances of this work are in how it sonifies and, to an extent through the swarming of the insects, visibilises biodiversity loss.