Archive for Information
May 8, 2007 at 8:09 am · Filed under Art, Research, Pollution, Atmosphere, Information, Discourse, Mapping, EPA, Manhattan, Government, Toxic, Contamination, 9/11, Brooke Singer
New work made for New Climates
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800 Steps Apart is a video triptych by Brooke Singer and Brian Rigney Hubbard that compares two opposing protocols endorsed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to handle cleanup in Lower Manhattan post-9/11. A Russian émigré, living at 300 Albany Street, was told by the Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the EPA to return to her apartment two weeks after 9/11 and to simply remove the dust and debris with a bucket and a mop. The other site, 130 Liberty Street or the former Deutsche Bank building, is just four blocks from 300 Albany Street, but a world apart in its approach to cleanup. 800 Steps Apart is a video short that is part of a larger documentary project by Singer and Hubbard about communities affected by toxic contamination, abandoned by the EPA and in search of responsive, environmental leadership.
Special thanks to the actors in “800 Steps Apart”: Christopher Murray, Erla Skúladóttir and Elizabeth Sweibel.
– Brooke Singer and Brian Rigney Hubbard
800 Steps Apart questions the response (and responsibility) of government agencies in environmental crises. The administration of toxin-cleanup after 9/11, the video shows, was not uniformly thorough or competent, leaving some victims to suffer the consequences of their contaminated environments. With this terrifying revelation, we are led to question how our government will manage future ecological and environmental disasters that lie on the horizon as a result of climate change. Indeed, 800 Steps Apart challenges the local/global opposition. By uniting a highly localized issue—contamination in Lower Manhattan—and questions of national environmental leadership, the video simultaneously addresses a narrow and broad audience. The way such disasters are handled—even at the level of neighborhoods, blocks and apartments—is relevant to us all; it speaks to our ability and preparedness to deal with environmental emergencies on the global scale—a response that will certainly be tested in decades to come.
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 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.
