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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
I have spent most of today and yesterday working on creating a series of sonifications of projected climate data for summers in the NY area provided to me by my collaborators the climate group of the NASA Goddard Institute (see www.andreapolli.com/centralpark/).
During the process, I have also been thinking about the upcoming Data Aesthetics panel put together by Mitchell Whitelaw and considering what 'data aesthetics' actually means.
Mitchell provided us with an interesting essay by Lev Manovich called 'The Anti-Sublime Ideal in New Media' to help set the stage for our panel. One thing that he says in the essay has been haunting me, in the section called 'Meaningful Beauty' he talks about the Situationists 'derive' (drift) work in which a city dweller experiences a city in a new way in order to re-consider the habitat. The city is interpreted as data might be: a map, an organized collection of street signs, a series of interactions, and the situationists interact with that data in various ways that create a personal interpretation or 'reading' of the city. He writes that in this work of the situationists there is a human subjectivity portrayed in the interpretation of the city data that isn't present in contemporary data mapping (here he is speaking primarily of visualization, but certainly this is an issue in sonification as well).
Today I started to realize that in creating the future climate sonifications, I am really trying to tell a story. The story is present in the model data itself, namely that in the near future the New York area will experience a dramatic amount of global warming. Through the development of the sonifications, I feel that I am attempting to dramatize this aspect of the data. As the temperature hits a critical point, the intensity of the sonification increases, the more days this occurs, the more intense the composition. The warming create a tension in the listener that hopefully will be amplified when coupled with the realization that this tension is directly mapped to the temperature.
In some ways, from many conversations with the climatologists, I know the story and am creating a setting for the story to be told, but in other ways as I listen to the sonifications, I am realizing that there are aspects of the story that I was unaware of but are unfolding from the data.
For example, I am using data from the 1990s, 2020s, 2050s and 2080s and it seems that within each decade there are a series of warmer days at the beginning and dramatically warmer days at the end. I'm not sure if this has to do with the actual data or that I listen more carefully and remember more clearly what happens at the end and beginning of each decadal composition. In the latter (more likely) case, a story about my own perceptual biases is formed not through the composition alone, but through the knowledge that the data is processed automatically through a controlled system without human intervention in real time.
The human interaction with the composition is the interaction of listening and interpreting through memory. The way my mind constructs the meaning of the 'story' through memory is informed by the human form that these compositions are taking. By 'human form' I mean listenability. That is, each composition is approximately five minutes long and contains sounds within the range of human hearing. Also to make changes in the data recognizeable to human ears, the speed of changes are set to a speed significantly slower than what my computer is capable of. I also created a mixture of low and high pitched tones and percussive and sustained tones. This 'texture' in my opinion increases the general listenability although it also says something about my personal tastes.
Music in my opinion is inherently narrative, and because one of our primary goals was to tell a story (the story of global warming in our own back yard) I think we have unintentionally discovered a suitable application for meaningful data aesthetics.
On Wednesday afternoon, June 16th, I will meet Ricardo Miranda Zuniga at Tesla Corner in Bryant Park near the New York Public Library to do a radio broadcast for the Radio Broadcast Cart, a recent project of Zuniga's in which a shopping cart is transformed into a mobile public radio station. The cart will use the free wifi available in the park since 2002, making it the first park to provide free wireless, to create a live internet broadcast.
Bryant Park has had an interesting history. In the early 1800's the area was a countryside far north of the populated city, and in 1823 the city established the land as a potter's field, or a burial ground for unknown or indigent persons. By 1840, urban sprawl had moved north and the potter's field was decommissioned by the city.
In 1844, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), a newspaper editor, poet, and activist was one of the first public figures to champion the need for urban open green space. His writings inspired a reform movement of artists, scientists, and politicians who wanted to counter what they felt was a moral and economic catastrophe. Waves of new immigrants lived in squalid conditions, found a changing labor environment where skilled craftsmen were replaced by unskilled laborers in impersonal factories, were exploited by opportunistic industrial bosses and machine politicians, and found themselves isolated, choking on new industrial pollution without any access to fresh air and a natural environment. Landscape architect of the reform movement Calvert Vaux called for the translation of 'Democratic ideas into Trees and Dirt' through the creation of large public parks and institutions that would equalize the masses and, in another landscape architect Frederick Olmsted's words, 'force into contact the good &bad, the gentlemanly and the rowdy' in the hopes to promote education and culture among all citizens. The reformers believed that a new relationship of direct interaction between citizens and the natural environment was necessary to maintain 'psychological equilibrium' in the individual and the society.
In 1849, a dramatic event galvanized this social reform movement. The Opera House Riot was a tragic incident in which racial and economic tension was projected onto a revalry between two great actors of the time, William Macready and Edwin Forrest. Macready was seen as a representative of New York's upper class, while Forrest was a favorite of the Irish poor and working class. The rivalry escalated to thousands of Forrest fans storming the Opera House while the militia attempted to guard the theater.
What then happened was shocking to all New York citizens, rich or poor. The militia fired upon the crowd, killed 22 rioters and wounded many more. This was the first time that US soldiers had fired into a crowd in the history of the United States and the shock of this tragedy inspired public and private partnerships and led reformers to work fiercely to improve the social decay. Later the Civil War Draft Riots, even more deadly than the Opera House Riot forced the movement to work toward even greater social reforms to create a more equitable balance of power between the rich and poor.
By 1847, the land that is now Bryant Park housed a reservoir water supply system and was designated as a public park called Reservoir Square, and in 1884, the park was re-named to honor William Cullen Bryant. In 1899, the New York Public Library opened adjacent to the park.
The park recognizes Bryant with a sculpture, and also houses the first monument dedicated to a woman, Josephine Shaw Lowell, a pioneering social reformer known as the 'unsentimental reformer.' The park also honors inventor of AC power Nicola Tesla with a monument and 'Tesla Corner' the corner of 40th street at 6th avenue. Nicola Tesla arrived in NYC for the first time in 1884, the same year Bryant Park was given its name. Tesla also fought for radical social reform, but instead of lobbying for free green space, his work was dedicated to working toward the creation of a free energy system. Although he never succeeded in acheiving that goal, his work prvided th groundwork for the free communications systems of radio and television. Tesla spent a large amount of the last decade of his life enjoying the free green space of Bryant park.
Today, New York's City's public green spaces remain sites of political controversy. A mass demonstration proposed for the 'Great Lawn' in Central Park this summer was blocked by Mayor Bloomberg because it would 'ruin the lawn.' Spokesman of the proposed march Bill Dobbs responded with 'It's great that Central Park is Manhattan's crown jewel, but it's also the most important public space and the only option for a mass rally in Manhattan; it shouldn't be turned into a grass museum.'
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