September « 2010 « Carbon Arts

SJ01

The San Jose Zero One (SJ01) biennial festival of art and technology took on the theme of Build Your Own World in 2010 and featured an impressive offering of symposia, talks, events, exhibitions, street parades, workshops and concerts all on the theme of sustainability and personal responsibility/ imagination. San Jose being home to Silicon Valley, the biennale, organised by Zero1, is about featuring the smarts of the area and showcasing how the arts are harnessing new technology for civic engagement. One hundred artists gathered from 22 different countries between 16-19 September to experiment with the public – a treat!

xAirport – prepare for wetland-ings!

Getting ready for flight

Natalie Jeremijenko’s xAirport project for the SJ01 festival is on the surface a fun zipline flight for participants to fly like a bird within a 10 foot wingspan over a constructed wetland. But of course, there are a host themes being explored through this participative performance. The recent decision by the FAA to ease the passage to personal sport-piloting threatens to put further stress on the environment, unless those small craft are encouraged to make ‘wet-landings’. Whereas air flight has contributed to date to major wetland loss through airport construction, small personal craft owners have the option to build wetland landing strips, and turn this trend around. Can we re-imagine flight and make personal airborne travel a viable alternative to infrastructure-heavy options?

Requiem for Fossil Fuels

Requiem for Fossil Fuels is the work of sound artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A). The performance features four accomplished singers chanting the requiem alongside O+A’s eight-channel digital orchestra of city sounds collected over 20 years and representing the voices our fossil-fuelled society – from helicopters to rush hour traffic to steel manufacturing. The Requiem is on tour in 2010, and was performed at St Joseph’s church in San Jose as part of the SJ01 festival to a standing ovation. O+A describe the work as a ‘timely and deep meditation on the culture, its fascinations, and its future’.

Amphibious architecture

Amphibious architecture was a project in collaboration with artist Natalie Jeremijenko that consisted of a floating installation of water quality sensors, motion sensors and LED lights in New York City waterways. Lights changed colour depending on water quality, such as dissolved oxygen, and flashed when fish passed by. As a way to engage New York citizens in the health of their river, the work was an innovative and educational public art work.

Particle Falls

Particle Falls is the work of artists Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga, which visualises real-time small particulate matter air pollution (PM 2.5) in downtown San Jose via the changing scale of a laser light cascade on the side of a city building. The work is made possible through the AirNow project which shares live air pollution data throughout the US. It aims to raise awareness amogst the public of air pollution and thereby encourage behavioural change. The piece is also accompanied by an real time web visualisation.

Beat Your Mouse Movement

The Beat Your Mouse Movement is a project by Kitchen Budapest to encourage people to walk farther in a day than the distance travelled by their computer mouse. Believe it or not, after 8 hours in front of a PC, the small movements of a mouse add up! Through an application, called Mousey, that tabulates the distance travelled by the mouse, the user is challenged to enter in distanced walked through an i-Phone ap, or pedometer. Pachube’s online platform for data sharing makes all this data open source. A great message and means to get balance back into our lives, and combat unsustainable behaviour patterns.

River Livers

Greenmeme’s River Livers are constructed wetland sculptures that aim to raise awareness about water quality and habitat loss. The sculptures actively break down pollutants in the water, and at the same time communicate environmental data, such as PH, to onlookers through colour-coded LED lights.

In the Shadow

Australian artist, Janet Laurence, produced the site-specific work, In the Shadow, for the Sydney Olympics within a degraded creek near the Homebush Olympic site. The work featured tall glass measuring rods representing the various chemical indicators of water remediation, and included the replanting of rushes and trees along the banks. Atmospheric fog circulated throughout the site, cooling and transforming the creek environment. Many years after the Olympics, efforts to deforest the creek banks were thwarted with the defence of ‘artwork’ – a lovely example of activist, environmental art winning over.

TrashTrack

Trashtrack

TrashTrack is the work of MIT’s Senseable Cities Lab, and part of a vision for creating behavioural change through pervasive technologies. By attaching sensors to individual items of rubbish and visualising its passage through the waste stream, the project raises awareness about waste disposal and the impacts of our smallest decisions, such as the purchase of a disposable coffee cup.

Art at the Dump – Recology

The Recology Artist in Residence program in San Francisco started twenty years ago in 1990 to invite artists to produce works sourced from the waste stream, as part of a program to educate the public at a time when curb-side recycling was introduced. This exhibition, at Intersection Arts, celebrates the impressive body of work generated from materials that would otherwise have gone to waste. The artists involved often became strong spokespeople for environmental issues following their experience.

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