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.
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
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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.
February 18, 2007 at 4:07 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, Thomson & Craighead, Appropriation, News Broadcast, The Future
New work made for New Climates
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In London, Thomson and Craighead appropriate and recontextualize a local news broadcast, offering a glimpse into a future ravaged by climate change. London presents a time when the effects of climate change are no longer speculation, but undeniably real. Is this world a distant fiction, or might we already be experiencing the inconvenient truth? The video’s unsettling revelation acts as a rallying call for action that we cannot afford to postpone.
