5. Supplemental Essay

The Glacier Whisperers: Art on Global Climate Change

Artist Andrea Polli listens to ice: its shifts, its flows, its steady thawing. N. (pronounced “n-point”) is a near–real time sonification of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic research program: Polli custom-built a piece of software to interpret this data stream and turn it into sounds. In the ghostly harmonics, the listener may perceive the changes taking place thousands of miles to the north. Empirical data is translated into an emotive resonance of loss and desolation. If we keep listening over the next few decades, we might hear Arctic temperatures skyrocket in a violent crescendo, followed by an eerie, liquid silence.

Is it that difficult to imagine? The year 2005 was the hottest in recorded history and the Artic is an open ocean. Many artists have realized that the key to averting meteorological catastrophe is twofold: it will require a cultural awakening to the danger at hand and the scientific know-how to curb emissions and drop the mercury. More than ever before, the artistic climate is shifting its attention towards eco-politics. In the new media art community in particular, an electric storm is brewing.

The pleasure of the melt

An Inconvenient Truth, the cinematic version of Al Gore’s lucid slide-show presentation on global climate change, has been an effective vehicle for bringing global warming into our collective consciousness. Frighteningly warm summer days now bring forth a flood of images: receding glaciers, Antarctic landslides, graphs of sudden, exponential rises in carbon dioxide levels and Gore himself pleading for our mobilization.

It is no accident that Gore’s message takes the form of a feature-length documentary and glossy, image-heavy book. The visual opulence enhances the book’s capacity to communicate a vast amount of complex information, making it easier to digest. Adopting popular artistic forms might be a useful tactic in disseminating the facts of global climate change. Doing so brings together art and science, sensation and information.

I didn’t see An Inconvenient Truth for the facts on the impending destabilization of our climate, which are now widely available. It was the promise of computer-rendered simulations of submerging metropolises that drew me to the theater and triggered a paradoxically satisfying rush of panic. Sleek and terrifying, these visualizations—showing the resulting rise in sea levels if portions of Antarctica or Greenland melt—accompanied by graphs and statistics, allow us to glimpse a terrifying future. They are effective in Gore’s mission to inspire action, but they also have a secondary value: creating an aesthetic of technological and geological wonder.

Gore’s dialogue is interspersed with still photographs of mountains and tundra taken a few decades apart. In their differences, one can make out the disappearance of permafrost and evaporation of lakes. Yet because they are photographs, taken at a singular moment in the past, these images remain stagnant documentations. In comparison, what makes the graphics of submerging cities so magnetic is that they render scientific data as projections into the future.

A tree grows in cyberspace

One thousand clones of a single tree were planted throughout San Francisco as a public art project in 2000. At the same time, new media artist Natalie Jeremijenko was growing trees on computer desktops. “Technology is too complex to control,” states Jeremijenko, “but its unintended consequences present an opportunity to redress the environmental crisis we’re facing.” Art and technology are natural collaborators. Trained in science and engineering, she developed an algorithm to interpret real time carbon dioxide levels in the space surrounding the computer. These data influence the growth of digital trees, which themselves become monitors of air quality and the subtleties of global climate change. The project’s title, A-trees, refers to a future in which artificial trees are all that survive.

Land art and earthworks, sculptural interventions like those created by Robert Smithson, have a legacy of responding to,and reconfiguring natural landscapes. New media projects go one step further, employing technology to reveal the environmental changes already taking place. In a 2002 project called Cape Farewell, scientists and artists venture into the high Arctic to develop their work in a shared mission to explore, mapping new terrain for contemplation and action.

There is an electronic interface between aesthetics and environmentalism. The web of life is recapitulated in the World Wide Web. For Iceberg (r11i01) (2005), Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle used radar and sonar technology to scan an entire iceberg adrift in the Labrador Sea. Once downloaded, the artist worked with an architect to create a three-dimensional, 25-foot sculpture of the iceberg based on the data. This copy, forged in aluminum and housed in a gallery, will never melt. Commenting on ephemeral geological forces, the sculpture acts as a metallic relic of the ice, a fleeting natural form. This project insists that we devise methods to preserve such essential structures, not simply replicate them.

Tomorrow’s forecast

Most galleries hibernate in August, yet what better time is there to consider the atmospheric pressure-cooker in which we reside? Prevailing Climate, an inter-disciplinary group exhibition at Manhattan’s appropriately named Sara Meltzer Gallery, was on display this past month.

The exhibition, which makes a concerted effort to include newer and older media projects, digs deeper into the word ‘climate,’ evoking its connotations of an atmosphere that characterizes a point in time. In his video Morning on the Archipelago Anthony Discenza remixes fragments of news broadcasts covering national disasters resulting from global warming. In doing so, Discenza creates a disorienting montage that questions how information is dispersed.

The digital art duo Thomson and Craighead collapsed time in Light From Tomorrow recording outdoor light conditions in the Kingdom of Tonga, a small cluster of islands in the South Pacific. These data were sent, via the Internet, across the International Date Line to a room in the San Jose Museum of Art. In close to real time, the viewer can perceive fluctuations in Tonga light conditions, occurring 20 hours in the future, in a light panel display installed on the gallery wall. A mysterious link forward in time, the light sculpture pushes us to think proactively—to remember that our actions today will impact our tomorrow.

Thomson and Craighead have expanded our view of global climate change before. Weather Gauge, a software program designed for projection on a gallery wall, displays current weather data for more than 150 countries simultaneously. This array of constantly shifting data might act as a monitoring station as our climate destabilizes; or, it might be a new kind of cartography, forgoing national boundaries for a more vital map of temperature ranges.

Last summer, Andrea Polli had her ear to the ground in New York’s Central Park. In Heat and the Heartbeat of the City she used the park as a base for a new series of sonifications that illustrate upcoming climate changes. Computer algorithms take weather data recorded in the park and, using scientific models, extrapolate future patterns. The resulting harmonics provide an auditory gateway to the drastic temperature increases that will occur between 2006 and the 2080s. In a sense, the work broadcasts the ecosystem’s own distress signal.

Polli presents an alarming narrative, yet one that acts as a social and political catalyst. By giving us visceral access to this otherwise abstract data, she, like Thomson and Craighead, ask us to imagine the future, and also the possibility of a different future—one where global warming has been curtailed. These works and their contemporaries contain an undercurrent of optimism; beneath apocalyptic visuals there is a glimmer of hope that it’s not too late. Our destiny is not written in stone, but is, instead, as malleable as the currents and weather patterns that encircle the globe.

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This article was printed in The College Hill Independent on September 15, 2006.