Archive for Global
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
Permalink
“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
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?
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 2:23 pm · Filed under Art, Andrea Polli, Travel, Global, Natural/Artificial, Pollution, Live Data
New work made for New Climates
Roadside Garden Socal
View webpage
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
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.
