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?’
The Climate Clock Initiative seeks to generate a work of public art in San Jose that draws on the technical and artistic prowess of silicon valley to engage the population in understanding and acting on climate change. The work is to last 100 years and be designed to a budget of $20million. Started as a competition, a number of short-listed teams have been working since 2008 to develop the winning concept, which was revealed in 2012 as the Organograph. The Initiative also seeks to expand the concept to other cities worldwide, to combine cutting edge technology for data measurement and display with arts’ power to communicate and engage.
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.
Reduce Arts Flights is a work by artist, Gustav Metzger, responding to the proliferation of arts fairs and arts tourism, and associated air travel. Produced as a leaflet the work is intended as a campaign to encourage artists and the arts industry to reflect on mass mobilization and address its own carbon footprint. The logo, reduced to RAF, is a reference to the Royal Airforce as well as the Red Army Faction conjuring up images of airforce destruction and reflecting the artist’s longstanding opposition to capitalism and the commercialisation of art.
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.
Maria Michails is a Canadian artist working at the intersect of ecology, technology and society. Her Handcar Projects are interactive works that employ the dynamism and historical context of the handcar to literally take the viewer on a journey to explore themes such as energy, industrial processes and mining. Through activating the human powered handcar (and in another project a rowing machine) the installations provide a direct relationship between energy consumption and expenditure. In On the Grid (pictured), the work examines the conflicts between competing uses of land for energy, housing and food.