Archive for Narrative
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 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.
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
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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 1, 2007 at 6:33 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, Appropriation, Joe Milutis, Travel, Cold, Geography, Narrative
New work made for New Climates
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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.
