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 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
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“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?
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
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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
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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.
