visual – Sensing Our World

Rare Earthenware

Title: Rare Earthenware
Artists: Unknown Field Division in collaboration with FIX
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): visual
Issue(s): toxic e-waste, metals, pollution

The Unknown Fields Division is a ‘nomadic design research studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness’.¹ Therefore, it is concerned with the various problematic interactions between nature and society. A particular project from the studio, Rare Earthenware was foregrounded in Neural in 2016. This project concerned visibilising the e-waste in the form of toxic metal, integral to the production of digital technologies such as smartphones and laptops.

In the Rare Earthenware project, documentation from areas of rare earth metal production were combined with ceramics production to create a visual and material representation of the toxicity of production of digital devices. The project traced the global supply chain of rare earth metals to ‘their source at a toxic lake in Inner Mongolia’.² Mud was taken from this lake and vases were created from the mud, in collaboration with ceramicist Kevin Callaghan. The vases were exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2014, and an accompanying video was also produced.

Where are the wild ones?

Title: Where are the wild ones?
Artist(s): Kaffe Matthews
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Audio, visual
Issue(s): Environmental health of water

This project is a place-based study of the river Tyne, charting through sound and visuals the journey of the Atlantic salmon, and revealing material from the source, long the length of the Tyne, to its mouth. The work is presented as sound and video, and ‘will weave myth with scientific data to make new music’.¹ The installation therefore mixes originally composed music, with sonic data from the river, along with Environment Agency of the UK data on pH levels, temperature, flow rates, oxygen and ammonia levels in the Tyne. These multiple data points ‘were used to define melody structure and rhythmic quality’.² Along with these environmental data points, Matthews also included data on fish populations and mortality (ibid.).

This project aims to engage ‘audiences of all ages’ (KM site), in a place-based environmental narrative of the river Tyne. Its contributions therefore are in how it engages local communities on matters connected to an aspect of their local environment.

In the Eyes of the Animal

Title: In the Eyes of the Animal
Artist(s): Marshmallow Laser Feast Collective
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): visual
Issue(s): biodiversity, ecosystem visualisation

This project is a 360º video and Virtual Reality installation in Grizedale forest in the UK. For this installation, specially constructed VR headsets were created and installed within the forest. When a viewer puts on the headset, they are taken on a VR journey, where they visualise the forest as different animal species. The installation includes recorded field sounds and a virtual mapping of the area using LIDAR.

This piece is important because, as humans, we see forests and nature in particular ways. However, this installation allows us to view the forest from the perspective of a different species, such as dragonfly. In this way, it is an attempt to transcend the anthropocentric assumptions of our relationship with nature, and to imaginatively visibilise how ecosystems can be viewed from different species’ vantages. For the project creators ‘the ultimate goal is to create an understanding of how these animals process optical information and so give people a chance to reflect on their own visual perceptions of the forest’.¹

eLEmeNT: EaRTh

Title: eLEmeNT: EaRTh
Artist(s): Nandita Kumar
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Sound, vision, touch – multisensory
Issue(s): Nature/society relationship, human impact on ecosystems

Element Earth is an elegant and delicate mixed media installation that is inspired by the principle of biomimicry
¹, that is ‘a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. The core idea is that Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more’.² This project therefore functions as a model of a living ecosystem, made with wood, printed circuit boards, sensors and various other elements associated with digital and/or electronic arts. The model is placed in a glass jar, providing the compelling visual of a ‘natural’ ecosystem made up of electronic components.

However, this work is not just a representational model – it in itself is ‘living’. For example, a tree within the model is made of solar cells which charges the circuit boards within the model. When charged, these electronic circuits make nature-based sounds such as those of the ‘big bang, the sound of earth from a distance through radio waves, whales mating, rain, wind, birds, etc’.
³ Furthermore, the human impact on this model environment is evidenced by a sensor attached to the glass jar itself. When the jar is touched ‘it makes high pitched electronic sounds which indicates our carbon imprinting on the diorama of Earth’ (ibid.).

Therefore, this project is a multi-sensory and interactive piece which not only visibilises the nature/society relationship, but in allowing for dramatic responses to the interaction with the jar, it materialises the human impact on an ecosystem in a bold symbolic audio gesture.

Human Sensor

Title: Human Sensor
Artist(s): Kasia Molglas
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Visual
Issue(s): Air pollution

This performance piece visibilises urban air pollution through a combination of a dance performance and wearable environmental sensors. The environmental sensors monitor air pollution, and the wearable costumes involve a mask that both monitors the air quality of the artist wearing the costume, and allows the costume to visually respond to the wearer’s respiration. It therefore revealed to urban audiences the visibility of environmental air pollution, while involving the performers in themselves being affected by the pollution. In this way, the project held a sense of complicity – at once the audience were given an aestheticisation of air pollution, yet in visibilising the pollution data, the audience was also aware that the performers were in real-time being subjected to that pollution. In this way, the Human Sensor work is a very visceral way of communicating a key environmental issue in contemporary urban contexts.

Project Dust

Title: Project Dust
Artist(s): Brother Nut
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): Sight? tangible
Issue(s): Air pollution, PM2.5, particulates

In this project, Brother Nut used an industrial vacuum cleaner to suck up air pollution in Beijing. He did this for 100 days, collecting the material. He then mixed it with red clay to produce a brick. In a sense this both visibilised and made tangible the air pollution in Beijing. The piece is therefore a thought piece on the levels of pollution in cities such as Beijing, and also a way of materialising such pollution.

What is Rising

Title: What is Rising
Artist(s): Gaspard and Sandra Bébié-Valérian
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): Sonic, visual, visceral/touch
Issue(s): Fracking

What is Rising is an audio-visual performance on the theme of fracking. The performance takes place in an anechoic chamber, that is one where there is no sound reverberation. The experience of being in an anechoic chamber has been described as very uncomfortable. The artists draw upon seismic data from earthquakes caused by fracking, and they use this data in a live audio-visual composition, where sounds are mixed with on-screen visuals and type, in a ‘sonic and sensory composition’.¹
The seismographs from existing earthquakes are ‘performed’ in real time in what is both a performance and installation.²

Additionally, there is a narrated component, with two narrators describing contrasting perspectives on the technological future-present. One character ‘trusts the system, he believes in its proficiency and thinks he belongs to [a] global system he doesn’t want to fight against’.³ The other character ‘feels the things, he’s scary [sic] and knows that he will ineluctably die in the catastrophe. He questions the system and tries to understand it’ (ibid.). Mixed with these voices are low-frequency sounds, and even infrasound, which is sound at frequencies that cannot be heard but are felt in the body. This adds a visceral component to the installation.

Sink

Title: Sink
Artist(s): Julian Priest
Source: TBC
Sense(s): Visual
Issue(s): co2 pollution, ocean acidification

This piece is a sculptural work from 2012 that stands ‘as a model of anthropogenic ocean acidification’.¹ Priest placed a scallop shell in brine, and attached a small combustion motor to the installation, and into the brine pumps the exhaust gases. This ‘killing environment’ ² thus simulates the contemporary environment of ocean acidification and pollution. Over time, the carbon dioxide released from the combustion engine, reacts with the brine, making it more acidic and eroding the scallop shell. This is a representation of the damage created by carbon, and at once it reveals the usually hidden ‘mechanics of operation and the connections with the world’ (ibid.), especially those of contemporary technologies. For Priest, ‘even when the workings are exposed, most of the time the environmental impact of a technology is not explicitly stated, but treated as an externality’ (ibid.).

For the purposes of this project, this piece is interesting in how it visibilises the process of environmental degradation, through the erosion of the scallop shell, while visibly connecting the cause – the combustion engine and carbon – into the installation. This removes the conceptual distance between what society does in its carbon-intensive practices, and the destruction that may be spatially distant from that society. By juxtaposing these two elements together in a ‘killing environment’, Priest removes that conceptual distance.

Floral Automaton

Title: Floral Automaton
Artist: Thomas Grogan
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): visual, visceral
Issue(s): ‘smart’ sensing, ecosystem growth

This piece is a digital installation that works with ‘smart city’ data to trigger visual representations of flowers in bloom. The installation does this in real time, to visibilise in a creative way the environmental data available in ‘smart’ city contexts. In this way it is an important work for this project. The project works with various environmental parameters, such as CO2 levels, light, humidity and temperature. Only when the parameters are within correct levels do the digital flowers represented on screen bloom. For the artist ‘Floral Automaton explores how environments become programmable and are made to be operational through sensor technologies. It sits as a response to the current trends for environmental programmability and computational environments’.¹