Archive for March, 2007
March 31, 2007 at 7:26 pm · Filed under Art, Natural/Artificial, Cary Peppermint, Christine Nadir, Wilderness
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Wilderness Trouble V1.0 was inspired by William Cronon’s article entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In this article, which was critical to ecocriticism’s recent shift from deep to social ecological models, Cronon argues that the concept of “wilderness” has no basis in nature but is a historical and cultural product. Cronon’s points out that the U.S. environmentalist preoccupation with conserving “natural” spaces untouched by humans was a guise of American colonialism (throwing indigenous people off their land to make national parks), and his concern is it fails to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and their environments. Refusing to separate modern human life from relatively “natural” environments, this meditational DV attempts think about nature and the digital technologies that make this work possible in the same frame. This video contributes to recent artistic efforts to challenge the separation of digital technology from the natural world and attempts to do so without naturalizing the digital nor romanticizing the “natural.”
– Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir
March 29, 2007 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Art, The Future, Travel, Geography, Narrative, Global, Time, Fiction, Mary Mattingly, Survival, Nomadism, Plate Tectonics, Feedback Loop
New work made for New Climates
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Pangaea Ultima follows a field reporter on a tour across newly demarcated P.U. as she describes the recent environmental and cultural changes. Through its present exhibition, P.U. casts an illusory glance at a yesterworld, with mechanical trees reminding us of the once natural forests. In Pangaea Ultima, self-replicating viruses run rampant and harnessing every possible energy source is a necessary livelihood. The reporter laments, accepts, and explains. Nobody had suspected the impending doom.
Narrated by Sarah Wilmer.
– Mary Mattingly
Pangaea Ultima presents a vision of a dystopic, post-apocalyptic future in which nomadic survivors navigate barren, inhospitable terrains. “When the public finally took notice, it was 43 years ago,” begins the voiceover narration. With this displacement into an imaginary yet eerily plausible future, long after rainforests were transformed into deserts, Pangaea Ultima continues the critique of humanity’s exacerbating role in global climate change, but deepens and complicates it by extending it into the domain of fantasy. An ambiguous sense of time and place productively hinders attempts to fix Pangaea Ultima in relation to present day causalities: are we seeing centuries, or merely months, into the future? Is this our destiny, or simply an otherworldly reminder of what could happen to our civilization? As viewers, we are asked to fill in the temporal gap between today and the indefinite moment at which the video takes place.
Through her video, Mary Mattingly discusses seismic shifts on a continental scale, but they are as much shifts in understanding as invented plate tectonics. The moment she imagines—the coalescence of Earth’s continents into a reconstituted Pangaea—contains a metaphoric resonance, suggesting a time when, as a species, we will shift our awareness of climate change and unite in an effort to survive. This return to Pangaea—a zero-point geological equilibrium before continental drift—and the return to a society of tribal nomadism, is also evocative of the structure of a feedback loop, a fundamental unit of networked technologies and a dimension of our global ecosystem. A property of such self-perpetuating systems is the capacity for adaptation; in Pangaea Ultima, humans have found a way to inhabit a hostile and unstable climate, one that existed before in geologic pre-history and will, ultimately, reoccur. As the nomads construct paradoxically ramshackle and futuristic dwellings, we are reminded of a cyclical narrative theme: Creation and destruction are inextricably interconnected, endlessly reenacted.
March 13, 2007 at 8:05 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, Natural/Artificial, Lisa Young, Time, Atmosphere
New work made for New Climates
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Higher-res version
During the calendar year 2001, I took a photograph of the sky each morning when I awoke. The resulting 365 photographs softly fade into one another, collapsing 12 months of time into a 12 minute video. The subtle relationships between the varied blue skies (some with clouds, others depicting an occasional airplane) are created both by a predetermined structure (the calendar) and elements of chance (changing weather conditions).
– Lisa Young
Calendar, by Lisa Young, presents an image of our climate for each day of one year, which have been strung together to form a video slideshow produced for this exhibition. Through this process-based experiment, she draws our attention to the ways in which our impressions of the natural world have been artificially structured by a timekeeping regime. In fact, climate “change” as we experience it is filtered through the larger concepts of temporality and chronology. How does natural, geologic or cosmic time synchronize or desynchronize with culturally constructed time? How should one monitor, record and preserve images of the ephemeral climate? Besides being a diligent record of a year in atmospheric shifts, Calendar is also reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s Sky TV (1966) in that it produces a sublime effect through its seemingly endless display of minimal skyscapes.
March 12, 2007 at 2:23 pm · Filed under Art, Andrea Polli, Travel, Global, Natural/Artificial, Pollution, Live Data
New work made for New Climates
Roadside Garden Socal
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Download the real-time application (stuffed archive .sit)
Mac OSX: socal.application.macosx.sit
Windows:socal.application.windows.sit
Linux: socal.application.linux.sit
Source code: roadside garden socal
Built with Processing
Roadside Garden Socal is a desktop application that downloads and visualizes daily amounts of O3 (ozone) and NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) in the atmosphere in Southern Californiain the form of a small roadside tree next to a live Southern California highway webcam.
Webcam image from the California Department of Transportation. Daily amounts of O3 and NO2 updated hourly provided by the South Coast Air Quality Management District AQMD www.aqmd.gov. NO2 air pollution is primarily caused by motor vehicles and, in some places, by energy production. Ozone (O3) is formed when other pollutants react to light.
Thanks to Kevin Durkee and the South Coast AQMD for assistance in retrieving the data.
Above is a pre-recorded version presenting data from March 12, 2007
– Andrea Polli
Roadside Garden Taipei
View webpage
Download the real-time application (stuffed archive .sit)
Mac OSX: taipei.application.macosx.sit
Windows: taipei.application.windows.sit
Linux: taipei.application.linux.sit
Source code: roadside garden taipei
Built with Processing
Roadside Garden Taipei is a desktop application that downloads and visualizes daily amounts of CO (carbon monoxide) in the atmosphere in Taipei in the form of a small roadside tree next to a live Taipei highway webcam.
Webcam image from the Traffic Engineering Office of Taipei City. Hourly EPA data formatted by Dr. Chung-Ming Liu, Director of the Global Change Research Center and Professor of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at National Taiwan University. Carbon monoxide is released by the incomplete combustion of fuels such as natural gas, charcoal, gasoline, and tobacco.
Above is a pre-recorded version presenting data from March 12, 2007
– Andrea Polli
Roadside Garden Socal and Roadside Garden Taipei, by Andrea Polli, visualize pollution in real time, conveying the immediacy of our impact on climate change. Live data readings of atmospheric conditions are translated into fluctuating tree-shapes, which “grow” next to current images of freeways in Southern California and Taipei. These two icons create an imaginary cycle of chemical emission and photosynthesis, or a dialog between artificial and natural structures of growth—urban sprawl and bifurcating branches. Roadside Garden also evokes the theme of dispersal—from the diffusion of molecules in the air, to the distribution of the artwork itself in the form of individual applications that serve as microcosmic air quality monitoring stations. Finally, since every viewer of the work will be accessing the same data stream, the project provides a sense of networked connectivity, suggesting a model through which we may begin discussing or altering our collective role in climate change.
March 12, 2007 at 10:09 am · Filed under Art, New Work, News Broadcast, Travel, Geography, Peter Eramian, Global, Natural/Artificial, Radio, Sun
New work made for New Climates
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Lower-res version
In Sunrise the scene is set with a dubious, yet beautiful, night time shot of the cityscape of Nicosia, Cyprus. The lights of the city can be seen glimmering in the horizon whilst the foreground is lit using green and red artificial lighting. Gradually, as daylight begins to set in, the city lights suddenly turn off, marking the beginning of a new day. As the sun begins to rise, a second layer gradually reveals itself with an opposing setting sun in reverse-time. The grid-like presentation of the two layers fragments the scene creating a disturbing, yet alluring sight in which the rays of the sun seem to reflect off one another.
Accompanying the visuals is a broadcast on the national radio station of Cyprus. The topics addressed by the spokeswoman include a commentary on the development and use of technology by mankind, its negative side effects and moral issues. She concludes that positive technological progress can only be achieved with a clean and conscious heart. A love song follows with the image of the sun being used metaphorically to symbolise love. The overjoyed tone of the song is then robbed of its cheerfulness by an explicit news story on the dangers and risks of global warming which ends with the statistic that the year 2006 was the sixth hottest in recorded history. As the two suns merge into one, perhaps referencing the Platonic imagery of the sun as “ultimate truth,” religious church singing closes out the scene. Is this a prayer for a future of hope and change, or mourning for a world that is already dead?
– Peter Eramian
Sunrise by Peter Eramian presents a seemingly natural vista and poses the question of its artificiality. Focusing on the sun, a focal point in the climate change debate, Eramian merges two video layers in an alternating grid—one depicting the sun rising in real time, the other with it setting at an accelerated rate—seeming to reference both our mediated experience of nature and our anxiety about the timeline of climate change. Sunrise emphasizes the global dimension of the climate change crisis and the technologies through which it is filtered. The audio track consists of a radio broadcast (including a report on climate change) and ambient sounds from the artist’s native Cyprus. The image itself is segmented into a pixel grid that references the work’s digitization and dispersal across the globe.
March 1, 2007 at 6:33 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, Appropriation, Joe Milutis, Travel, Cold, Geography, Narrative
New work made for New Climates
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Lower-res version
Line of 32 by Joe Milutis presents the search for cold weather as a meandering, emotive narrative. Combining found footage from the Web, still images and otherworldly audio-visual recordings of Lake Michigan, the video creates a sense of longing for the seasonal temperature shifts of yesteryear. Line of 32 explores the climate change crisis at a personal level, presenting an alternative, or perhaps complementary, perspective from the cold, hard, and anonymous numerical data of climatology. Milutis reminds us that our experience of global changes in weather will be constructed by local, individual observations; no matter how universal a concern, climate change will always hit close to home.
