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?’
Taiwanese artist Vincent J.F Huang installed Penguin Suicidesunderneath the Millenium Bridge in London in March 2010 with a letter from ‘Penguins Representative Bureau of London’ appearing on his website to explain the creatures’ act of protest and personal sacrifice in the name of global warming awareness raising. The plight of animals in the North and South poles is poignantly represented by this work, which attracted much attention.
Solar ballerinas – or audio tutus – is the work of Benoit Maubrey, who has developed a number of electro-acoustic scupltures. The tutus respond to the sun’s intensity by emitting sound that corresponds to the level of light. The tutus also pick up on local sounds and feed these back, generating sound loops. As the dancer moves the white noise and sampled sounds change, creating a performance that is fascinating and hard to ignore.
Lyndal Jones: Art, Place and Climate Change
Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno‘s work speaks to us of an alternative way of living, through the creation of self-contained ecosystems that invite us to live in floating worlds or bubbles, free from borders and free from a potentially polluted world. He approaches the subject of climate change from the viewpoint of an architect offering a Utopic vision, one which is both inviting and frightening if we consider that we might need to create alternative worlds if we continue to allow the earth to degrade. Saraceno’s work also poetically emphasises the links between all living things through the intricate and complex web that his own creations exhibit.
Doomed, a video work by Australian artist, Tracey Moffatt, consists of a series of edited catastrophic moments spanning the last 50 or so years of cinema. This relentless experience of disaster becomes almost comic as we face up to our human fascination with the destructive forces of nature – including those of our own making. Doomed gives us pause to consider whether we somehow, subconsciously desire this end and whether such warnings will have the ability to turn us away from our doomed path.