Archive for Geography
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
Permalink
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 13, 2007 at 9:16 am · Filed under Art, Geography, Live Data, Ben Engebreth, Mapping
A New Component of Personal Kyoto (2005-6)
View Full-Size Map
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
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
Permalink
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 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
Permalink
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
Permalink
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.
