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?’
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.”
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?”
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.
Tipping Point is a UK based organisation dedicated to harnessing imagination in the fight to stabilise the climate. A network-based organisation, Tipping Point connects artists and climate scientists through events, conference and public debates. In addition, Tipping Point provides science briefings for artists and works with arts organisations to address their own climate impact and potential for leveraging change. Tipping Point also has offices in Australia and Canada.
Ken Yonetani is a Japanese artist resident in Australia. He explores themes of fragility and consumerism in the context of climate change. Recent works have focussed on the Great Barrier Reef, including an installation that showed at the 53rd Venice biennale, where models served cake at 1pm every day, cake in the form of coral. The pollution of the Great Barrier Reef by sugar cane plantations is only one connection made explicit in this provoking and beautiful installation, all made of sugar.