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?’
In 2012 Eyebeam Art & Technology Center presented Surface Tension, an exhibition and arts lab developed by Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, which brought together work by international artists, designers, engineers and scientists to explore the future of water. The work exhibition examines water’s physical properties, its role in politics and economics, and ways in which it may be harnessed, cleaned, and distributed.
World Offset is the work of American eco-visualisation artist Tiffany Holmes, and presents itself much like a campaigning website where people pledge different actions to reduce their carbon footprint. As more pledges are made the graphic above changes, so that at certain thresholds appliances are replaced by trees. Holmes is trying to present both the futility and necessity of our small actions, and the work is itself a statement against offsetting – preferring action to purchasing emissions reductions elsewhere.
Amphibious Architecture is a public artwork that creates a dynamic and captivating layer of light above the surface of the water that makes visible the invisible through real-time sensing of the environmental health New York’s urban rivers. Two networks of floating interactive tubes, installed at sites in the East River and the Bronx River, house a range of sensors below water and an array of lights above water. The sensors monitor water quality, presence of fish, and human interest in the river ecosystem. The lights respond to the sensors and create feedback loops between humans, fish, and their shared environment. An SMS interface allows citizens to text-message the fish, to receive real-time information about the river, and to contribute to a
display of collective interest in the environment.
The Secret Life of Things was a series of animations, commissioned by EPA Victoria and company Eco Innovators, for the State of Design festival 2010 in Melbourne, communicating the life-cycle impacts of common products. Life-pscyclology – the secret life of the phone is one of them. Created by Layla Acaroglu, it depicts a phone going to therapy to try and discover why he’s been abadoned and how he can emark on a new life – based on the valuable materials contained within him. Very cute!
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.