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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
A post from Geoff Manaugh of movingsurface.net has been circulating to several lists I'm on. It references an unnamed article in The New Scientist:
"Because the earth itself is already a musical instrument: there is a deep, low-frequency rumble that is present in the ground even when there are no earthquakes happening. Dubbed the 'Earth's hum', the signal had gone unnoticed in previous studies because it looked like noise in the data."
"Competing with the natural emissions from stars and other celestial objects, our Earth sings like a canary it drones on in a constant hum... If it were several octaves higher, and hence, audible to the human ear, it could probably get recorded by the unpredictably omnidirectional antennas of ShortWaveMusic and... you could download the sound of the earth."
Last Wednesday evening Kate Sparke Richards presented her work to my Sound Environments class. She is an Australian interactive media artist who was in New York to document the process of a theater group that uses new media extensively, The Builder's Association.
Kate presented interactive media work she had been doing with crime scene photographs from post-war Australia. She also presented a project shown at the Helsinki ISEA festival. Part of the exhibitions in this festival were installed on a giant ferry that traveled between Helsinki and Estonia. Kate's work was on the ferry and juxtaposed images and sounds from the Australian desert with sonogram data from the Baltic sea. It's interesting to think that many deserts were once vast seas.
Some desert sand dunes have been known to emit various kinds of sounds. This phenomenon has been documented in literature from the Middle East as far back as 1500 years and has been documented in Chinese literature as far back as the 9th century.
The sounds resported have been described as booming, moaning, roaring, singing, squeaking, and musical and have been compared to the sounds of a violin or trumpet, foghorn or helicopter. The sound has been described a vibrating the entire body of the listener.
Sand dunes that create these sounds are rare, the phenomenon requires a specific type of desert sand: medium grained, dry, and smooth surfaced. Sand like this is produced by sand moved large distances by the wind over many generations, so the older and larger the desert, the more it 'sings.'
As you can imagine, various mythology has been created to explain the booming sand dunes. Near Fallon Nevada, Sand Mountain is said to have been a prehistoric lake in which lived a large sea dinosaur. The sounds created by the sand of Sand Mountain are said to be the sounds of the ghost of this lonely dinosaur calling for its mate.
Sound files of booming dunes are available here:
http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~nori/booming_sand.html
I was very please to receive positive feedback on the Queensbridge Wind Power Project from Paul Hawken, best-selling author of Natural Capitalism
http://www.paulhawken.com
Natural Capitalism discusses how businesses might look to the natural world as a model for sustainable business practice. In the natural world, there is no waste, every material becomes part ofthe cycle, providing fertilizer for plants and food for animals and insects. Hawken's book profiles several companies that have found ways to reduce and reuse waste and energy, a business cycle more akin to a life cycle.
This was his response to the Queensbridge project:
"The Queensboro Bridge is a beautiful artifact of the industrial age and this project represents the transition that can and must be made from the industrial age, dependent on fossil fuels, to an industrial era that lives off of solar income...wind is solar energy too, and all sustainability is about getting the income to expense ratio on solar income to something that can be sustained by living systems."
I had almost forgotten about the important fact that wind is caused by the sun's energy. How does this work? Because the Earth is a spinning sphere that revolves around the sun that has an uneven surface, the sun heats the Earth unevenly. The cycles of day and night and the seasons are the most obvious effects of the constantly changing solar energy levels in any one place on Earth.
But the Earth is also made of various land and water formations, structures that absorb heat from the sun in different ways. Air over land heats more quickly than air over water. You've probably experienced this by taking a refreshing dip into a cool lake or ocean after sweltering on a hot beach.
When air is heated, it rises. You've probably experienced this when you've gone into the cool basement or hot attic of an old house. So, air over the equator which gets more direct sunlight is heated more quickly than air over the poles, and air over land which is heated more quickly than air over water, both rise into the atmosphere more quickly. This creates the complex wind currents.
Why are they so complex? It's the nature of air particles to move fluidly through space. Imagine smoke from a lit cigarette as it rises into the air. The visible smoke is warmer than the room, so it rises, but it also twists and turns creating more and more complex curls and spirals.
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