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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
Every couple of weeks, Chuck and I go to a Russian Bathhouse near our neighborhood in Queens. It's a great way to relax and rejuvenate.
If you haven't been to a Russian Bathhouse, I must tell you that it's very different than a spa or health club, at least the ones I have been to in New York. This one offers various kinds of unhealthy treats like vodka, beer and Russian food right in the area of the baths that you can sit and enjoy in your swimsuit and robe. For me, I have discovered a bottled mineral water from Georgia (the Russian one, not the southern one) called Borjomi. I have found that a cold Borjomi is the perfect way to replenish salts and water lost in the sauna.
Today I discovered that in 2003, the source of Borjomi water was threatened by British Petroleum. BP was planning to create an oil pipeline in Georgia that could go directly through the Borjomi springs. Millions of barrels of crude oil a day would have traveled throuh that pipeline and one slight accident would have ruined Borjomi.
BP even published their plans in only English and prevented the Georgian minister from seeing them until the last minute to try to drive their plan through. There was a public outcry that involved the BBC and PBS, and according to PBS the pipeline should have become active in 2005 and would have run as close as 16 kilometers to the spring. Also according to PBS, BP was ordered to suspend construction in 2004. Still looking for the current status of the project.
I learned of this and other interesting information here:
http://www.carbonweb.org/
that was linked from a project I'm participating in here:
http://www.walkinginplace.org/
More about that project later.
Next month a collaborative project I've been working on with UK based artist and programmer Joe Gilmore will premiere at the Lovebytes Festival. Here's a description of the project:
"What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever." Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
The North Pole. 90 degrees North. A point where the spinning of the Earth slows to zero, where every direction points South and the sun rises and sets just one time each year. English Romantic literature is filled with ideas of polarity, contrary forces, attraction and repulsion, separation and reconciliation. From this perspective, the North Pole functions as a symbol of the fusion of opposites, combining natural beauty and brutality. The Pole is not simply a desolate and remote environment, but it is remote to a glorified extent—sublime desolation.
Media artist and writer Lev Manovich has described much contemporary database art as 'anti-sublime'. He uses this term to describe works that distill the vast, mysterious information landscape into reductionist digital morsels for human consumption. N., by examining the North Pole in real time, a location known as 'the last imaginary place on Earth', reaches toward the classical romantic sublime, the contemplation of humankind's ultimate fate in an uncertain world.
N. is an artistic visualization and sonification (direct translation of data to sound) of near real-time Arctic information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Arctic research program. According to NASA climate scientists, a dramatic warming trend has been experienced by the Arctic over the last decade that may accelerate global climate change. The N. installation expresses the isolation and environmental extremes of this remote region and addresses the importance of the region to the global ecosystem.
A portion of the raw sound material used in N. comes from live sferics (short for atmospherics), global electromagnetic transmissions of lightning. The INSPIRE VLF (very low frequency) receiver at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is the source for this live audio stream. N. also makes use of a custom, open source object for Max/MSP called Datareader designed by Andrea Polli and Kurt Ralske. Datareader is designed to automatically input and use scientific tables of data in real time to alter imagery and sound.
N. is an ongoing, evolving composition. Directly tied to the turbulent weather of the Pole, the composition is ever changing, transforming in completely unexpected ways. In the tradition of art works like On Kawara's One Million Years, Agnes Denes' Tree Mountain-A Living Time Capsule and Jem Finer's Longplayer 1000-year sound composition, N. unfolds and evolves on a climatological temporal scale, a scale far beyond an individual human lifetime.
However, N. also addresses an increasingly alarming acceleration of the known rate of climate change. In the context of the Kyoto protocol, the European Union recently defined dangerous levels of temperature change to be 2.5 degrees C. But, in only ten years, average temperatures in the Arctic have increased almost 9 degrees C. In global climate research, a change of this magnitude at this speed is unprecedented. N. tracks the changes at the pole and begs the question: how much warming is too much?
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