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 Fun Theory is an initiative of Volkswagen in Sweden – a competition of ideas – that is based on the theory that you can get people to change their behaviour by making it fun to do the right thing. Turning the stairs next to an escalator in a public metro into a giant musical piano keyboard created a shift of 66% of users to the stairs instead of the elevator. A rubbish bin in a park that makes a funny noise when waste is deposited encouraged people to clean up the park for the pure joy of throwing away waste. Such demonstrations show the power of creativity to make a measurable difference. Watch the amusing videos on their website.
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.
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.
Natalie Jeremijenko’s xAirport project for the SJ01 festival is on the surface a fun zipline flight for participants to fly like a bird within a 10 foot wingspan over a constructed wetland. But of course, there are a host themes being explored through this participative performance. The recent decision by the FAA to ease the passage to personal sport-piloting threatens to put further stress on the environment, unless those small craft are encouraged to make ‘wet-landings’. Whereas air flight has contributed to date to major wetland loss through airport construction, small personal craft owners have the option to build wetland landing strips, and turn this trend around. Can we re-imagine flight and make personal airborne travel a viable alternative to infrastructure-heavy options?
The subjects in Josh Wodak‘s series of futurist portraits ‘when I was buoyant’, confront us with the dual realities of climate change and human nature. Posing in position of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, of Al Gore fame, their arms become the axis for plotting sea level rise which stretches 1,000 years into the past to a moment when, as Wodak point out, King Canute defiantly and eventually dejectedly faced the rising tide. The portraits offer up the space between the present moment and the fated year 2028 (when global temperatures are expected to rise 2 degrees), eerily questioning our ability to stay afloat.