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?’
Rekindling venus is an augmented reality project that uses digital platforms – the web, the smart phone – to connect us to the world’s coral reefs and their plight in a changing climate, drawing on real-time data, video and imagery. It is the work of Australian installation artist Lynette Walworth, who has collaborated with marine biologists, climate change modellers, underwater cinematographers and meteorologists, to bring focus to the complexity of coral ecosystems as they attempt to deal with increasing environmental stresses. The work will have a second phase in 2012 to show at planetariums around the world.
Mirage brings an iceberg to a city’s public square using 3D photography and a unique viewing system that allows for an up-close and personal experience of wonder. Through the positioning of binocular shaped ‘viewers’ around Melbourne’s iconic Federation Square, artist David Burrows creates the actual scale of the iceberg, which took about 30 minutes to walk around and occupied the same space as many city centre buildings. Burrows developed Mirage from an expedition to Antarctica as 2011’s Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellow, Visual Artist.
Founded in 2006 by David de Rothschild, Sculpt the Future Foundation‘s aim is to promote positive environmental change towards global sustainability by supporting creative, innovative and sustainable action. Through the Foundation David runs Adventure Ecology which takes expeditions of scientists, artists and young people to polluted areas of the globe to inspire change. The most recent, Plastiki, took a catamaran from San Francisco to Sydney to tackle the issue of plastic waste in the ocean. A highly awarded and inspiring social entrepreneur, David de Rothschild is on a mission to create a Planet 2.0 model for acting and living.
Animal Wall by artist Gitta Gschewendter is a large-scale public artwork that provides 1000 apartments for bats and birds. Situated along a 50 metre wall, Animal Wall was commissioned as part of a new residential development in Cardiff, Wales, and mirrors the provision of the 1000 homes for humans. A direct response to the loss of natural habitat that housing developments are partially responsible for, the artwork contributes both practically and aesthetically to the needs of public space.
Plunge is a new climate change-themed public artwork in the City of London by artist Michael Pinsky. Sited in three locations around key historic monuments, Plunge communicates future sea level rise through an elegant series of LED powered rings. Each ring shows where the Thames is expected to reach in the year 3111 if current carbon pollution trends continue. In the words of the artist, at one level the work places the viewer deep below the water’s surface, and at another level the work “suggests a protective shell, proposing that we have a chance to change this situation.”