Creative solutions for a changing climate
Here’s where we share all the cool projects we’ve come across. Ones that inspire, surprise and touch the heart. In all these ways we see how artists open new avenues for change. Click on the categories below to browse our directory of projects. Enjoy!
Birding the Future is a sound and stereoscopic installation that brings extinct birds back to life. Reflecting on the role of birds as warning messengers and their disappearance as part of the ‘sixth extinction’, the project asks: “What does it mean that we can only see and hear extinct species through technology? How can traditional ecological knowledge be combined with technological advances to increase awareness of our role in the environment?”
Artist Jiayu Liu uses wind data from 40 Chinese cities to power a poetic installation that seeks to test the boundaries of data representation at the same time connecting us to a powerful force of nature. An innovative use of city data, we’re excited by what the work of this RCA graduate might bring to the realisation of more sensitive and sustainable urban environments.
Could it take a a synthetic representation of nature to jolt us back into re-appreciating its beauty and our reliance upon it? That’s one the questions Pierre Proske is seeking to explore with his Brickets. So named for their chirping sounds and brickish size, the Brickets reinterpret data from local environmental sources such as the nearest home’s water usage, into animal like calls, which rise and ebb in response to one another, much like a synthesised colony of frogs, cicadas or crickets.
KiloWatt Hours, by Sydney based artist Tega Brain, uses lasers to inscribe in space the fluctuations of energy used by the surrounding building over time. KiloWatt Hours thus converts energy meter data into the readable form of an ‘energy clock.’, and the audience is prompted to consider the invisible consumption of energy in everyday life. Over time the laser light fades, and KiloWatt Hours forgets itself, in the same way we let our own energy use slip from memory.
A simple representation of Sydney’s climate data, Mitchell Whitelaw’s Measuring Cup makes it possible to hold the past 150 years of temperature information in the palm of your hand. Generated and printed using 3D technology, Measuring Cup uses temperature averages, like the rings of a tree, only stacked vertically. The result is delicate and beautiful, like the climate it represents, and it raises the question ‘what shape will it take in 10, 20 or 50 years?’
KiloWatt Hours, by Sydney based artist Tega Brain, uses lasers to inscribe in space the fluctuations of energy used by the surrounding building over time. KiloWatt Hours thus converts energy meter data into the readable form of an ‘energy clock.’, and the audience is prompted to consider the invisible consumption of energy in everyday life. Over time the laser light fades, and KiloWatt Hours forgets itself, in the same way we let our own energy use slip from memory.
From the Cape Farewell expeditions comes the touring exhibition in London, Liverpool, Hamburg, Madrid, Tokyo in 2006, 2007, 2008 and now Cranbrook, USA in 2010.
The power of analysis and argument itself is not enough, actual participation and public experiments and the willingness of people to suspend disbelief and to change is really what creates a social force.
In an ingenious twist on the ye-olde cure all remedies, Eyebeam have generated a product that makes you think twice about the efficacy of sewage treatment plants and the medication that we (over)consume all the time. Alviso’s All-Salt is produced from a water body near the San Jose treatment plant in California and the local salt flats. The myriad medical products contained in the product are offered up for free as a shockingly ready combination of anti-depressants, anti-biotics, pain relief, and so on. A darkly humourous reminder of our role in the growing impurity of the environment.
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.