Archive for April, 2007
April 18, 2007 at 7:23 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, The Future, Time, Information, Experience, Anthony Discenza, Randomness, Recombination, Discourse
New work made for New Climates
Launch Project in a New Window
States is a set of 200 words drawn from scientific and corporate language. Organized into separate, randomly shuffled columns, these word sets combine to produce over 6.2 million potential phrases (or “states”) suggestive of planetary changes either reflective of, or causally related to, human intervention in the climate. By turns absurd and ominous, these randomly generated, linguistically distanced phrases create a continually unfolding series of speculative fictions which contemplate the dystopic and/or catastrophic scenarios produced by climate shift.
– Anthony Discenza
In States, four-word sequences rhythmically appear in a black void. These words, selected by the artist but displayed at random by the software, combine to form often poetic and always surprising discursive “impressions” of the climate change crisis. Rather than recycling or creating images of climate change, already abundant in our visual culture, the Flash project prompts the viewer to generate her/his own mental percepts to accompany the word-strings. At times, chance combinations—such as “Critical Climate Combustion Chronology”—exhibit linguistic phenomena as unexpected as inclement weather and as profound as skillful haiku.
Discenza accesses the discursive network that has been used to discuss climate change in the scientific and corporate worlds, deconstructing and reconstructing it in order to allow for new and potentially subversive combinations. Simultaneously, States illustrates the ways in which meanings are applied to words based on the framework in which they appear—the words acquire “states” of relevance or valence when they are (randomly, endlessly, mechanically) juxtaposed within the context of an exhibition on climate change. In turn, Discenza suggests, these recombinant poems have the potential to shift one’s state of mind, sparking chains of association and new lines of thinking.
April 18, 2007 at 6:25 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, Appropriation, The Future, Global, Pollution, Time, Atmosphere, Survival, Science, Michael Alstad, Livestock
New work made for New Climates
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“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
– Albert Einstein
According to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), cows, pigs, sheep and poultry are among the world’s greatest environmental threats and contribute a staggering 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions—considerably more than transport, which emits 13%. The report, entitled “Livestock’s long shadow,” says the meat industry is degrading land, contributing to the greenhouse effect, polluting water resources, and destroying biodiversity. Livestock use 30% of the earth’s land surface and pastures for cattle use 70% of deforested areas in the Amazon. Massive deforestation is expected as meat consumption is expected to double by 2050 as the populations from emerging countries embrace an unhealthy “western diet” based on meat products and fast food.
Curiously, the environmental threat caused by the meat industry has been mostly absent from the ongoing dialogue about climate change. Even the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth failed to address the livestock industry’s impact on global climate change.
In the video Methane, I combined footage of factory farms found on the web using the search tool in Flickr, YouTube, and various blogs, with an animation from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre Scientific Visualisation Studio. The animation depicts the breakup of the Ayles Ice Shelf in Canada’s Ellesmere Island on August 13, 2005. More than 90% of the ice cap has been lost. The piece shown in the animation is equivalent in size to approximately 11,000 football fields. The Canadian Arctic is experiencing the highest degree of climate change on the planet.
– Michael Alstad
Have we overlooked one of the largest factors in global climate change? Methane is an eye-opening and devastating portrait of the livestock industry as a main producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Our contribution to a destabilizing climate does not stop at the toxins being dispensed into the water and air, but includes the animal products we farm and consume. Alstad emphasizes a circuit between the unnatural living environments of stockyards, ensuing environmental damage, and the Arctic ecosystems that are impacted. Though the footage is shocking, the real cause for alarm—and motivation for immediate action—lies in the causal relationship that is exposed. Why has this link been so often ignored or concealed? What other aspects of the debate have been deliberately left in the dark?
April 16, 2007 at 2:43 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, The Future, Geography, Global, Time, Humor, Gail Wight
New work made for New Climates
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This work is similar to some video pieces I made in the late 80s, on secrecy and the CIA, the obliteration of nature, and the misfiring of well-intended efforts. I was angry then, and I’m still angry now. The issues have changed a little, but not all that much. When it comes to the government, the issues seem like they’ve hardly changed at all.
Still, my anger doesn’t help. In much of the work I’ve done since that time, I’ve addressed issues of pain, brutality, well-intentioned mistakes, horror . . . but always through humor. Humor is a way for me to get close to things that are otherwise too painful, too infuriating. How to address our nation’s leaders’ calculated negligence on the topic of global warming? Chocolate, kazoos, sand paper, and a heat gun. Go nowhere on Earth Day.
– Gail Wight
National Agenda is part political activism and part Theater of the Absurd. Wight expresses dissatisfaction with our government’s response to global climate change with an intentionally preposterous and violent spectacle. Is this how our political leaders understand (or fail to understand) the changes occurring on our planet—as simply a blunt matter of “things getting hotter”? Coming into harsh contrast with the slick, effects-heavy computer renderings of Earth’s ecological future used in television reports on climate change, National Agenda’s humorous foregrounding of artifice asks us to question the depth of our own understanding of and commitment to the issue. What is the national agenda for climate change?
April 15, 2007 at 12:58 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, News Broadcast, The Future, Narrative, Live Data, Time, Science, Jane D. Marsching, North Pole, Spectacle, Noise, Information, Experience
New work made for New Climates
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How can we make sense of the climate change predictions in the news? What does a seven degree temperature rise in the Arctic really mean? How do we absorb scientific information into our everyday lives?
The news headlines that came up on March 21, 2007, when I entered “north pole” into the Google News search ranged from stories of endurance and adventure (such as kiteboarders surfing our farthest north) to movies set at the Pole and watercolor classes offered in North Pole, Alaska. From heroic achievements to Hollywood spectacle, from small community experiences to the geopolitics of climate change, the circumpolar north is our cultural repository for our deepest fears and wildest imaginings of the past, present, and future of our planet.
Rising North takes monthly temperature readings from the North Pole data buoys and visualizes the rise in temperature of 7 degrees Celsius over a century (until 2107) that some climatologists predict for the region. Standard temperature color choices range from pale blue at –37 degrees to warm orange at 9 degrees. The audio combines background shortwave frequency static with the voice of an opera singer singing the top headlines from Google News about the North Pole on March 21, 2007.
The video takes the subject of our direst climate predictions and renders them with a collision of experiences: the visual component is an economical color field shift from cooler to warmer hues, while the audio contains a traditional operatic voice recounting the media headlines, laden with emotional drama and fighting to rise above the static.
– Jane D. Marsching
As a rendering of scientific data and media reports on climate change in the Arctic, Rising North gestures towards our incapacity to truly absorb and process the magnitude of this information. Rather than recapitulating words or numbers, the video offers emotive fields of experience (both in the visual and auditory spectra) through which we might derive a new, if strikingly incomplete, understanding of “our farthest north.” Rising North, through its ambiguous color modulations and operatic voice that hovers at the limits of intelligibility, may propose that our comprehension of the Arctic is already necessarily partial—it is a region most of us will never encounter first-hand—even as it becomes a heated locus in the climate change discussion. By selecting opera to be the vehicle of conveyance, Marsching also suggests that the Arctic has become a stage upon which the media spectacle of “global warming” is being enacted; we will listen intently to the dramatic tale of its transformation, thawing and steady climb into the frightening upper registers.
April 13, 2007 at 9:16 am · Filed under Art, Geography, Live Data, Ben Engebreth, Mapping
A New Component of Personal Kyoto (2005-6)
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More than anything else, Personal Kyoto is an information project that aims to give users feedback on their individual level of electric use. The idea stems from the realization that few of us have any idea of what our electric use really is and that this lack of information is an impediment to reducing our use. For New York City residents, Personal Kyoto works by gathering individual electric use data from a user’s ConEd (the New York electric utility) account via its existing online billing system. Personal Kyoto simply takes this data and creates a more intuitive consumption metric—a running 12 month average of electric use which smoothes seasonal variation—and provides a reduction goal recommended by the Kyoto Protocol.
For the New Climates project I wanted to work on a way of looking at the aggregate electric use data in a geographical way. The map above shows the average monthly electric use for Personal Kyoto users at the zip code level. The green portions of the map indicate Personal Kyoto users that are consuming less electricity than users in the redder portions of the map. It is worth noting, however, that the biggest consumers of electricity on New York still consume less than the average American household which uses 800 kWh a month. The largest monthly average on this map comes in at 720 kWh.
The electric use map is updated regularly at the Personal Kyoto site.
– Ben Engebreth
April 1, 2007 at 5:55 pm · Filed under Commentary
Clockwise from top left: stills from videos by Mary Mattingly, Thomson & Craighead, Peter Eramian and Lisa Young
If this is your first visit to New Climates, welcome to the site. If you are a frequenter or subscriber, then you’ve probably been observing the exhibition’s evolution over the past several weeks, following the start of its continuous, three-month-long launch. Since late February, seven remarkable projects have been created for and released on New Climates, each by a different artist (or artists) addressing the theme of global climate change within the context of our networked culture. An additional seven new projects are scheduled to open by May 15.
Thomson & Craighead reconfigure our preconceptions about the timeline of climate change with a “foreshadowing” of London’s future. Line of 32, by Joe Milutis, offers a personal meditation on climate change, suggesting that it is truly in the eye of the beholder. Peter Eramian has created a structurally paradoxical visual rendering of a sunrise, revealing the technologies that mediate our access to the natural landscape. Andrea Polli programmed digital “roadside gardens” that harness live data streams, visualizing them as organic structures and monitors of air quality. Lisa Young’s peacefully hypnotic Calendar is a diligent attempt to render a portrait of our constantly shifting atmosphere. Pangaea Ultima, by Mary Mattingly, constructs a fantastical terrain in order to question the reconfigurations—both geological and mental—that will occur in the future as a result of climate change, as well as the necessity of adaptation for surviving these shifts. Glacial Lakes, Hyacinths, by Trumbull & Simon, ponders how natural or “climate time” is both utterly incomprehensible and has been manipulated to fit our temporal conventions.
You are invited and encouraged to leave your comments about any of these projects, or the exhibition in general, and join the discussion.
New works by the following artists are forthcoming: Michael Alstad, Jane D. Marsching, Gail Wight, Anthony Discenza, Futurefarmers, Brooke Singer, Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. In addition, Ben Engebreth and Michael Mandiberg will provide bloggable versions of existing works.
For more information on this exhibition, including a video/text introduction, bios of the contributing artists and essays, please see the “About” section of the sidebar.
Please spread the word and let others know about New Climates.
Enjoy the weather.
– Shane Brennan
April 1, 2007 at 3:36 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, Narrative, Natural/Artificial, Time, Science, Seasons, Horticulture, Perception, Trumbull & Simon
New work made for New Climates
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Ecosystems are perpetually involved in a complex dance at various
spatial and temporal scales. Outsiders of the environmental sciences
tend to view nature or our natural landscapes very much like a
photograph, a still shot, but nature is a moving picture show.
– Mat Trumbull
As our climate changes, will we perceive time differently? Glacial Lakes, Hyacinths by Mat Trumbull and Sarah Simon explores the intersection of personal, subjective temporality and the abstract “environmental” and “universal” temporal schemas dictated by the natural sciences. Given that our corporeal frame of reference is so narrow—our time on Earth so short in contrast to larger climate trends—how can we experience, study and discuss the vastness of geological and ecological shifts? Does the key lie in manipulating natural time, as with “bulb shows,” bending it to fit our artificial models?
Glacial Lakes, Hyacinths also investigates the concept of the archive, presenting a paradoxical hybrid of fluid psychological archiving (in the form of a private narrative) and systematic scientific archiving (represented by imaginary file entries in what could be a measureless database of climatological knowledge). Neither system is dominant, but rather they blend and overlap with one another. In the disjunction between personal experiences and scientific explanations of climate, Glacial Lakes, Hyacinths suggests we can find new ways to measure time; once we realize that “spring” is a fabrication, we might see environmental changes—those spanning 24 hours or thousands of years—through a different lens.
