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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
On July 4, I had the pleasure to visit the rooftop garden of environental artist Meg Webster. Since 1985, she has been cultivating an oasis on top of a Williamsburg Brooklyn industrial building. There is a large pond filled with giant goldfish and cat tails, and several large trees that she says just 'appeared'. Like many other environmental artists, Webster is interested in native plants, having created a California native garden on the ground of Stanford University. This Brooklyn green roof, one of the first of what is now becoming a movement, has had a positive impact on the building, and although the day was sweltering hot, I found I felt much cooler on the roof.
Sadly, the building has recently changed owners and the current owners have been very hostile to Webster's work. They have threatened to take her to court to remove the garden, and now have evicted her. Of course she has found other places to work, but it's a real shame that the building owners don't see the long term benefits (yes, financial as well as aesthetic) of this work of art.
I'm currently reading geographer Simon Winchester's book 'Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded August 27, 1883'. In it he tells the story of the discovery of plate tectonics. It was very interesting to me to read that in the late 1950's/early 1960's many scientists were interested in measuring the magnetic fields of the earth. There was speculation that these fields were not stable and that the poles of the earth actually were in different places in the geological past. While investigating this, they discovered that the Earth has a liquid core and that the Earth's crust moves in a series of plates like glaciers.
I was interested in this history because of what I know about the history of experimental electronic music. Charles Dodge's seminal electronic music piece Earth's Magnetic Field published in 1970 that translated data for the earth's magnetosphere into sound. This was one of Dodge's first computer music compositions and was called one of the most important musical works of the 1970's. The information he used was from the early 1960's.
I always wondered why Dodge chose the magnetosphere, but knowing now that there were major scientific breakthroughs happening in the early 60's based on measurements of the earth's magnetic fields, it is much more clear to me.
On the Future Feeder site, there is a brief posting about work being done to extract video from the brain and a link to a 1999 scientific publication: http://futurefeeder.com/index.php/archives/2005/06/23/extracting-video-from-the-brain/
I have seen this kind of work done before with monkeys. A monkey would be made to look at a grid of lines for some time and then killed. The visual cortex of the monkey's brain would then be extracted and examined and in fact a pattern like the grid was visible in a series of brain cells.
The 1999 video work was done using cats, and what makes me kind of sad when I look at the images in the article is wondering whether these are actually the last images the cat saw before it was sacrificed for the experiment.
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