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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.

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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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More than anything else, Personal Kyoto is an information project that aims to give users feedback on their individual level of electric use. The idea stems from the realization that few of us have any idea of what our electric use really is and that this lack of information is an impediment to reducing our use. For New York City residents, Personal Kyoto works by gathering individual electric use data from a user’s ConEd (the New York electric utility) account via its existing online billing system. Personal Kyoto simply takes this data and creates a more intuitive consumption metric—a running 12 month average of electric use which smoothes seasonal variation—and provides a reduction goal recommended by the Kyoto Protocol.

For the New Climates project I wanted to work on a way of looking at the aggregate electric use data in a geographical way. The map above shows the average monthly electric use for Personal Kyoto users at the zip code level. The green portions of the map indicate Personal Kyoto users that are consuming less electricity than users in the redder portions of the map. It is worth noting, however, that the biggest consumers of electricity on New York still consume less than the average American household which uses 800 kWh a month. The largest monthly average on this map comes in at 720 kWh.

The electric use map is updated regularly at the Personal Kyoto site.

– Ben Engebreth

Clockwise from top left: stills from videos by Mary Mattingly, Thomson & Craighead, Peter Eramian and Lisa Young

If this is your first visit to New Climates, welcome to the site. If you are a frequenter or subscriber, then you’ve probably been observing the exhibition’s evolution over the past several weeks, following the start of its continuous, three-month-long launch. Since late February, seven remarkable projects have been created for and released on New Climates, each by a different artist (or artists) addressing the theme of global climate change within the context of our networked culture. An additional seven new projects are scheduled to open by May 15.

Thomson & Craighead reconfigure our preconceptions about the timeline of climate change with a “foreshadowing” of London’s future. Line of 32, by Joe Milutis, offers a personal meditation on climate change, suggesting that it is truly in the eye of the beholder. Peter Eramian has created a structurally paradoxical visual rendering of a sunrise, revealing the technologies that mediate our access to the natural landscape. Andrea Polli programmed digital “roadside gardens” that harness live data streams, visualizing them as organic structures and monitors of air quality. Lisa Young’s peacefully hypnotic Calendar is a diligent attempt to render a portrait of our constantly shifting atmosphere. Pangaea Ultima, by Mary Mattingly, constructs a fantastical terrain in order to question the reconfigurations—both geological and mental—that will occur in the future as a result of climate change, as well as the necessity of adaptation for surviving these shifts. Glacial Lakes, Hyacinths, by Trumbull & Simon, ponders how natural or “climate time” is both utterly incomprehensible and has been manipulated to fit our temporal conventions.

You are invited and encouraged to leave your comments about any of these projects, or the exhibition in general, and join the discussion.

New works by the following artists are forthcoming: Michael Alstad, Jane D. Marsching, Gail Wight, Anthony Discenza, Futurefarmers, Brooke Singer, Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. In addition, Ben Engebreth and Michael Mandiberg will provide bloggable versions of existing works.

For more information on this exhibition, including a video/text introduction, bios of the contributing artists and essays, please see the “About” section of the sidebar.

Please spread the word and let others know about New Climates.

Enjoy the weather.

– Shane Brennan

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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.

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Wilderness Trouble V1.0 was inspired by William Cronon’s article entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In this article, which was critical to ecocriticism’s recent shift from deep to social ecological models, Cronon argues that the concept of “wilderness” has no basis in nature but is a historical and cultural product. Cronon’s points out that the U.S. environmentalist preoccupation with conserving “natural” spaces untouched by humans was a guise of American colonialism (throwing indigenous people off their land to make national parks), and his concern is it fails to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and their environments. Refusing to separate modern human life from relatively “natural” environments, this meditational DV attempts think about nature and the digital technologies that make this work possible in the same frame. This video contributes to recent artistic efforts to challenge the separation of digital technology from the natural world and attempts to do so without naturalizing the digital nor romanticizing the “natural.”

– Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir

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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.

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During the calendar year 2001, I took a photograph of the sky each morning when I awoke. The resulting 365 photographs softly fade into one another, collapsing 12 months of time into a 12 minute video. The subtle relationships between the varied blue skies (some with clouds, others depicting an occasional airplane) are created both by a predetermined structure (the calendar) and elements of chance (changing weather conditions).

– Lisa Young

Calendar, by Lisa Young, presents an image of our climate for each day of one year, which have been strung together to form a video slideshow produced for this exhibition. Through this process-based experiment, she draws our attention to the ways in which our impressions of the natural world have been artificially structured by a timekeeping regime. In fact, climate “change” as we experience it is filtered through the larger concepts of temporality and chronology. How does natural, geologic or cosmic time synchronize or desynchronize with culturally constructed time? How should one monitor, record and preserve images of the ephemeral climate? Besides being a diligent record of a year in atmospheric shifts, Calendar is also reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s Sky TV (1966) in that it produces a sublime effect through its seemingly endless display of minimal skyscapes.

Roadside Garden Socal

View webpage

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

View webpage

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Queensbridge Wind Power Project presents a vision of a future when meeting energy production needs can actually enhance the beauty of a city, investigating how clean, renewable wind power might be integrated into the landmark architecture of the Queensboro Bridge.

– Andrea Polli

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According to NASA climate scientists, a dramatic warming trend has been experienced by the Arctic over the last decade that may accelerate global climate change. N. is an artistic visualization and sonification (direct translation of data to sound) by Andrea Polli and Joe Gilmore presenting weather data modeled by Dr. Patrick Market of the University of Missouri and Arctic images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Arctic research program.

– Andrea Polli

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Airlight is the name given to a visible white smog caused by the illumination of fine dust particles in the air. Airlight Taipei is a networked real-time sound and visual installation using updated data from an EPA air-quality monitoring station in central Taipei indicating various air pollutant levels including sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and ozone. This data is translated into sound and imagery in real time. The result is a rhythmic pulse that transforms throughout the day.

– Andrea Polli