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?
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.
