Creative solutions for a changing climate
With the advent of pervasive data and new sensing technologies artists have quite literally become barometers, seizing upon new materials and techniques to create instruments to measure and translate the natural 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.
Live Forever is the work of artists Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess whose practice Infranatural seeks to tie the built environment to the natural pulse of a living city. A Los Angeles fire station is host to the public art work, which acts as a barometer of the county’s fire risk through a web of humidity & temperature sensors stretched across the facade like a a growing vine. LED lights at each node flash across the building in shades of blue to red, making people aware of their environment, frequently warning them to take care with sparks and cigarettes.
Heralding the arrival of new and renewable wind power to the City of Sydney, Earth versus Sky is a nightly performative artwork in the City of Sydney, Australia. As the sun begins to set, an onsite surveillance camera takes a picture of the sky and calculating an average colour for every 5 seconds during 1.5 hours, the installation re-projects the inverse of this colour onto two, large Moreton Bay Fig trees, with spectacular results. The work of artist, Allan Giddy, himself a pioneer in renewable energy technologies, Earth v Sky brings a new awareness and sensitivity to the environment through public art.
Flow by Owl Project and Ed Carter, is a remarkable new public art work in Newcastle that explores the relationship between art, environment, design and industry. Commissioned for the London 2012 Olympic games as part of its cultural program, Flow is at once tidemill, river monitor and electo-acoustic performance. Inside the mill are housed three pieces of musical machinery: the Salinity Sequencer, the Bubble Synth and a Laser Turbidatron, all of which create unique real-time soundscapes in response to hourly river water samples and audience interaction.
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.
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.
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.
Climate Bubbles was a playful, participatory, mass data collection project in Manchester which engaged citizens in collecting information on air flow, thereby informing the Met Office about the Heat Island Effect. Futuresonic and Landcaster University teamed up with the Met Office to work with artists and scientists to devise an inventive, engaging way to collect this otherwise elusive data. Lead artists were Drew Hemment, Alfie Dennen, and Carlo Buontempo.
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?’
Particle Falls is the work of artists Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga, which visualises real-time small particulate matter air pollution (PM 2.5) in downtown San Jose via the changing scale of a laser light cascade on the side of a city building. The work is made possible through the AirNow project which shares live air pollution data throughout the US. It aims to raise awareness amogst the public of air pollution and thereby encourage behavioural change. The piece is also accompanied by a real time web visualisation.
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.
Distracted, a poetic interpretation of scientific ice core samples taken in Antarctica, is the work of Brisbane-based art, design, and media production collective Kuuki. An installation of acrylic tubes housing LEDs, resin bubbles, found organic matter and sensors, Distracted is an evocative and interactive experience, evoking ice, fluids and the notion of change. A number of data sets are used to create the abstract visualisation and sonification in the work, creating a unique context for understanding human presence and impact on the planet.
In the Air is a project which visualises environmental pollutants in the urban environment, as a platform for collective awareness, decision-making and political action. Initiated in Madrid, by Media-Lab Prado, it has since been replicated in Santiago de Chile and Budapest.