Archive for The Future
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 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 16, 2007 at 2:43 pm · Filed under Art, New Work, The Future, Geography, Global, Time, Humor, Gail Wight
New work made for New Climates
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This work is similar to some video pieces I made in the late 80s, on secrecy and the CIA, the obliteration of nature, and the misfiring of well-intended efforts. I was angry then, and I’m still angry now. The issues have changed a little, but not all that much. When it comes to the government, the issues seem like they’ve hardly changed at all.
Still, my anger doesn’t help. In much of the work I’ve done since that time, I’ve addressed issues of pain, brutality, well-intentioned mistakes, horror . . . but always through humor. Humor is a way for me to get close to things that are otherwise too painful, too infuriating. How to address our nation’s leaders’ calculated negligence on the topic of global warming? Chocolate, kazoos, sand paper, and a heat gun. Go nowhere on Earth Day.
– Gail Wight
National Agenda is part political activism and part Theater of the Absurd. Wight expresses dissatisfaction with our government’s response to global climate change with an intentionally preposterous and violent spectacle. Is this how our political leaders understand (or fail to understand) the changes occurring on our planet—as simply a blunt matter of “things getting hotter”? Coming into harsh contrast with the slick, effects-heavy computer renderings of Earth’s ecological future used in television reports on climate change, National Agenda’s humorous foregrounding of artifice asks us to question the depth of our own understanding of and commitment to the issue. What is the national agenda for climate change?
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 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.
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.
