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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
This afternoon Chuck and I were watching the sunset over the New York City skyline out our living room window. We were noticing the way the light changes the color of the smoke coming out the smokestacks in unexpected ways. I imagined that we were on top of a mountain in the Southwest and that the smoke from the smokestacks were smoke signals coming from the other mountaintops.
Smoke signals are used to send simple messages, warning those far away of danger or as a call for help. A slow, simple system. The artist Germain Koh whose work translates language into other systems created a piece called Prayers in 1999. In Prayers, a smoke machine was networked to an office computer that translated its daily texts into Morse code. This translation manifested as smoke signals that could be viewed from the street outside the building. <see http://www.germainekoh.com/prayers.html>
The name of the work, Prayers, brings to mind the tradition of sending black or white smoke from of the chimney of the Vatican to indicate whether or not a new Pope has been chosen.
As we were watching the smoke, Chuck explained to me the different types of fires. Through his work with pyrotechnics, he has had to learn about class A, B and C fires and the different kinds of responses necessary. One way to tell the kind of fire is to view the color of the smoke. Unlike the black smoke of the Trade Towers burning, the smoke stacks outside were emitting a white smoke. Not any less dangerous, Chuck explained that the white smoke was most likely Carbon Monoxide.
It seems that these smokes stacks are sending their own messages, if unintentional, alerting us to the poisoning of our atmosphere.
Germain Koh created another work addresing an invisible danger. In a work called 'By the Way' the sound of cars as they pass La Torre de los Vientos (Tower of the Winds), a 15-metre-high conical sculpture by Gonzalo Fonseca on a Mexico City highway is translated into the sound of wind which was then transmitted to the public via a radio transmitter.
Koh wrote about 'by the way': "It is a kind of alternative traffic report, one which tends to become the weather report at the same time. I was hoping that in that city [Mexico] infamous for its congestion and pollution, the project might provide a quiet opportunity to imagine a more open space and conditions for passage."
Thinking about human impacts on the earth's ecosystem has brought me to look at the work of people thinking about human impacts on other worlds and the idea of ecopoiesis. Ecopoiesis is a term coined by Robert Haynes from York University in Toronto to mean ‘the making of an abode for life,' or the human creation of a self-sustaining ecosystem, or biosphere, on a lifeless planet. Another more well-known term for this is terraforming, a concept that first appeared in science fiction in the 1940s and gained popularity with Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 novel 'The Sands of Mars'. Carl Sagan wrote scientific articles about terraforming both Mars and Venus in the 1960's.
Most studies on ecopoiesis focus on Mars because of its similarity to the Earth in terms of size, gravity, etc. Theoretical proposals for the ecopoiesis of Mars range from the introduction of what are caled 'super greenhouse gases', that is certain types of fluorocarbons that will increase the amount of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere and force the warming of the planet. Estimates say that it would take hundreds of years before Mars was habitable to life, and then several thousands of years before it would become habitable to humans.
Other proposals look at various forms of bacteria that can live in anaerobic conditions called 'extremephiles.' These living creatures could prosper on Mar's current conditions, and would increase the level of CO2 in the atmosphere therefore contributing to warming. Some of these 'pioneer organisms' are described here: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/pioneer.htm
Robert Zubrin and Christopher McKay proposed a more radical idea, that of warming Mars using a giant orbiting mirror reflecting the sun's energy onto the surface of the planet.
"I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the Earth, my feet know perfectly; and my blood is part of the sea".
D. H. Lawrence
from Apocalypse
I've been reading Tyler Volk's book, Gaia's Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth, which provides a good overview of the chemical and biological interactions supporting John Lovelock's theory of Gaia, that is that the Earth is a living system. At the same time, I've been working on a performance for Harvestworks in March. I've been experimenting with modulating the sound of my breathing with real time wind and temperature data from the arctic.
It started me thinking about my individual impact on this living system of Gaia. Just how much oxygen do I take away from the system each day? How much CO2 do I put back into the system? How much heat energy and what is its effect on the Earth? I imagine being able to visualize this in real time, having glasses that will show me my exact input and output perhaps in the form of different colored clouds. At my feet, I can see through the goggles a slow motion and amplified view of the impact of my footsteps, like rippling waves. When I make a sound, the energy of the sound's movement creates the same ripples in the air. I imagine I can use this augmented reality system to pick and choose exactly what I want to focus on, perhaps amplifying the sounds of microscopic creatures dying and coming to life on my skin, or perhaps creating a detailed map projection following the trajectory of air molecules as they leave my body in a tiny breath.
I think about Marx's concept of alienation. In his idea, alienation occurs when humans lose control of their creations. For example, money was created for the purposes of exchanging goods and services more easily, but now money in itself can have power over individuals and groups of human beings. If human made energy production systems that are dramatically increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere are transforming the earth as many scientific studies indicate, can this process also be thought of as a process of alienation? And, is this transformation of Gaia very literally a process of alienating humans from the earth, as it is a process of tranforming the earth into an alien habitat?
Earth: 78% N2, 21% O2, 0.03% CO 2 + liquid H2O
Mars: 96% CO2, 3% N2, 1% Argon etc.
Venus: 96% CO2, 3% N2, 1% H 2SO4
Tommorrow I'll be visiting with Anna Maria Nicholson, the director of the Holocenter in New York and in preparation did a little looking online for interesting projects using holography. I came across some military uses of holography including the holosight, aka the HOLOgraphic Diffraction Sight (HDS), the first electro-optic sighting system to apply holographic technology to small arms.
I also came across some speculation about the use of holographic technology in non-lethal weapons research. A while ago I wrote about the Flying Dutchman illusion, or the 'Ghost Ship' that appears floating in the sky. This illusion is caused by the reflective properties of water in the atmosphere creating a giant mirror in the sky. An article attributed to David Hamling of The Sydney Morning Herald in 2000 discusses how this phenomenon might be exploited as a military tactic. Interesting idea for an art project. I'll quote the whole article here:
"We are in Baghdad, and something strange is happening. A hush falls over the city as a huge shimmering face materialises in the sky. Soldiers and citizens prostrate themselves as each hears the voice of Allah, commanding them to overthrow the evil and treacherous Saddam Hussein. Within minutes an angry mob is storming the palace as the guards flee ...
This highly imaginative scenario was proposed by US Air Force (USAF) planners for a bloodless victory in the Gulf conflict. The idea of putting words in God's mouth is not new. In the second century AD Lucian described a statue of the god Aesculapius that spoke to believers, aided by a hidden priest with a speaking tube.
The Baghdad plan involved projecting a giant hologram over Iraq. This kind of projection requires a mirror behind it. The scale of the project dictated a mirror several kilometres across up in space. So far the largest mirror developed has been 30 metres wide and present versions are too small to produce a convincing image at ground level.
Another approach would be to make a mirror out of thin air. When warm air lies on top of cold air, the difference in density is enough to bend light. At higher altitudes, a mirage can make whole landscapes appear in the sky. An artificial mirage could in theory be made by heating the atmosphere with radio waves or microwaves.
The military certainly appears to believe in the potential use of holograms. A USAF think-tank has devised uses ranging from deceptive holographic imaging to the Star Trek-sounding distortion field projector. These are described as useful for strategic deception purposes, particularly against an unsophisticated adversary. They would be projected by a special aircraft, an airborne hologram projector.
Perhaps the nearest current equivalent is the Commando Solo, a modified Hercules festooned with aerials and antennae and carrying pods of classified electronics. It can transmit across the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio and television signals.
The face of God needs a voice. A new technique using microwaves could produce this. When a high-power microwave pulse strikes the human body, a small temperature disturbance occurs, causing an expansion of tissue that can create an acoustic wave. A report from the USAF scientific advisory board says: 'With a pulse stream, an internal acoustic field of 5-15KHz can be created which is audible. Thus it may be possible to 'talk' to adversaries in a way which would be most disturbing to them.'
The practical difficulties in microwave transmission are formidable. The exact sound perceived depends on the size and shape of the hearer's skull and orientation to the source. Microwaves can be reflected or dampened by solid objects, so God's voice could have the underwater quality of poor radio reception. And would you believe in a God whose voice drops off when you walk behind a lamp-post?
But there were other problems with the plan. Images of Allah are forbidden in Islam. How can you project an image of God when nobody knows what He is supposed to look like?
And the citizens of Baghdad are not superstitious savages, prone to fleeing at the sound of a disembodied voice from a gramophone. They have been exposed to years of computer-generated imagery and flashy special effects. If God's image did appear in the heavens, someone would be bound to suggest it was all done with mirrors."
On the net, the exploration of this concept is identified as the 'Blue Beam' project.
'Vermeer in Bosnia' is a book length collection of journalistic articles written by Lawrence Weschler. In one of the articles, titled 'The Light of L.A.' Weschler tells of a meeting with Glenn Cass, an environmental engineer at Caltech. Cass is concerned about the level of pollution in L.A., partcularly with how this pollution changes his visual experience of the city. The smog of L.A. is well known, and in Cass's experience this smog has increasingly obscured his view of the San Gabriel mountains since the 1950's. His complaint about smog, he says, is principally aesthetic.
As an environmental engineer, Cass knows about smog not only through personal experience, but through scientific research. He has found that the reason the smog obscures the view has to do with the size of the particles in the air. These particles are about the the same diameter as the wavelength of natural sunlight, and when sunlight hits one of these particles, it acts like a tiny mirror bouncing the sunlight in various directions. Billions of these particles in the air create the visible white smog that obscures the mountain view. This smog, causing a whiteout of the mountains in the distance is called 'airlight' and Weschler describes it as a billion tiny suns.
When the internet first started to become widely accessible, I, along with many other people, saw a vision of a future when the vast resources of the internet would be availaable to everyone. My vision was tied into the idea of ubiquitous computing, that is, the idea I had was that computers would be everywhere like telephone booths.
Of course ubiquitous computing is a here today, although the reality is somewhat different than this vision. General purpose networked computers are available in schools and libraries, but internet phone booths don't exist. In fact, even conventional phone booths seem to be disappearing as cell phone usage increases. Computers are everywhere, but they are specialized computers embedded in digital devices: cars, appliances, televisions, etc.
I realize now that the reality of public internet accessibilty is more like the reality of the mechanized transportation system. The steam engine changed transportation. Railroad systems built around the globe radically increased the speed the movement of goods and people. However, the vision of vast railroad networks remains unrealized, and in fact like phone booths, railroad systems have become obsolete, replaced by cars and elaborate highway systems.
Cars gave people a greater level of independence and freedom. Instead of having to wait for a train to arrive and share the experiencwe with strangers, a person can jump into a car and travel in comfort and privacy. However, this freedom of movement depends on accessible public roads. This combination of public and private systems has prevailed over trains to the point of creating enormous traffic congestion problems.
Similarly, when using a cell phone, one doesn't have to find or wait for an available phone booth, or worry about the comfort and cleanliness of the booth when found. However, cell phone usage depends on a satellite network, and as everyone who has used a cell phone knows, this network is far from perfect.
The use of networked computing is following this path. Portable personal devices that allow users to check email and surf the internet are becoming more and more popular. Like trains and phone booths, public internet access terminals will become obsolete in favor of these personal devices. And, like public roads and cell phone networks, a system of wireless public accessibility will be demanded by users.
A week ago I had dinner in Chicago with Naomi Spellman, a California-based artist who works with locative media. We had participated together on a 2-week online discussion about locative media initiated by Naomi and Brett Stalbaum. The discussion can be viewed here:
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/~location/phorum/
We talked about the forum and plans for a residency program at UCSD, about meaning and metaphor in locative media, and about looking at sensory models for navigation and communication like techniques used by autistic and blind people. One project of particular interest to me is 34 North, 118 West, a locative media artwork created by Spellman and Jeff Knowlton. Information about that project can be viewed here:
http://34n118w.net/
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