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!
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?’
Modelled on any other health clinic, Natalie Jeremijenko’s NYU xClinic prescribes treatments for your environmental aches and pains. Newsmotion is a prototype for a roaming bulletin board which can be retro-fitted to your bike wheels, and delivers data to those around you based on where you are. For instance, onlookers might be made aware of pedestrian and cyclist fatality statistics for the very corner they’re standing on, thereby bringing the data to life.
Greenmeme’s Hyperion-Son of Uranus is a sculptural visualisation of the sewerage infrastructure of LA county, represented as a time-stamp in 2009. Commissioned for the new Environmental Learning Center for the Hyperion Wastewater Treatment plant, the grid-like structure bulges where pipes are largest creating a unique topography from volumetric data. Fashioned from recycled street signs collected from CalTrans over 3 years, Hyperion flashes green and silver as light hits the surface, a reminder of the multiple layers of infrastructure both visible and hidden.
“Julie’s Bicycle was created almost three years ago by a cross section of people from across the music industry who felt strongly about the need for concerted action to improve the environmental impact of the music business. We are a not for profit company with a small staff and a board made up of senior figures from the music industry.” – ony Wadsworth, Julie’s Bicycle Chair and BPI Chairman.
Julie’s bicycle has achieved much in assisting the music, and now the theatre, industry to address their own carbon footprint and leverage their role to reach out to the broader community to affect change.
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.
American artist Fritz Haeg is leading a project which aims to encourage families and other housing groups to replace the ubiquitous front lawn with edible front gardens. Each garden responds to its specific location and conditions, with a view to promoting ‘a more productive use of the land between our homes and the street, and a closer relationship with neighbours, our food, and the natural environment.’ While most of the prototype gardens are in the United States, Edible Estates are cropping up (pardon the pun) in parts of Europe as well, however, the artist considers it a global project and the website is full of information on how we can all nurture our own food bowl.
A new interactive sculpture at the Texas State University Campus aims to draw comparisons between it’s students and it’s local river life. Representative of a school of fish, visitors can interact with Fish Bellies by climbing on it and influencing its colour changes. It’s creators, JB Public Art, hope that by drawing comparisons between the social behaviour of fish and of students, the latter can become curious and engaged in the ecology and biology specific to their campus.