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CrossTalk BackgroundSubmitted by richard on Sun, 2008-03-30 05:23.
Context
The approach will draw on our previously successful ‘free-media’ programme which finds resources, channels of communication and inspiration in the surrounding man-made environment. This work will extend the ‘free media’ by incorporating organic and inorganic materials found in the rural environment. Our immediate aim is a new perception of nature and a strategic approach to ‘mapping out’ and incorporating ‘natural media’ systems. Our results will be presented as field studies in reconfiguring and augmenting the natural environment as a media network. We anticipate this to be of particular relevance to ecological art and design, naturalists, those monitoring environmental change and those developing policy aimed at the publics engagement with the ecological agenda. Previous Research DUCK ARMADA
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in Seattle, has used drift bottles and other floating objects to study and model the flow of water across the North Pacific. His interest includes the possible historical and cultural significance of objects that may have floated across the Pacific Ocean from China and Japan to the Americas and influenced native cultures. "I run a flotsam headquarters" collating informal reports from 1,000 beachcombers around the world”. An estimated 2,000 to 10,000 cargo containers go overboard each year. Ebbesmeyer has tracked Nike trainers, Lego building bricks, hockey gloves, umbrella handles, and even a 50-foot-long US Air Force booster rocket. West Coast beachcombers have found booty that appears to have been in the sea for decades, such as a plastic ball decorated with 40-year-old cartoon characters, and Japanese glass fishing- net buoys that have not been used for half a century. In January, 1992, a container ship going from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington encountered severe storm conditions near the International Date Line (44.7°N, 178.1°E). Twelve containers went overboard, one of these 20-metre containers held a shipment of 29,000 bathtub toys. The first landfall of these toys was reported on November 16, 1992 on the beach of Baranof Island just south of Sitka, Alaska, six toys were found. OSCUR (Ocean Surface Currents Simulation) uses measurements of air pressure going back to 1967 to calculate wind speed and direction, and the surface currents produced "and then apply that to fisheries problems," Ebbesmeyer adjusted OSCURS to model the drift of these toys and then used it to predict where the toys would next reach landfall. Through the Bering Straits, after being trapped in Arctic ice for four years they are due to start floating down into the Atlantic by 2001 (because of the melting ice flows). Capt. Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in California, "dedicated his time and resources to understanding and remediating the ocean 's plastic load." The Pacific gyre, a huge circular current "is like a toilet that never flushes". Two particularly polluted giant eddies he calls the "garbage patches", he astonished the scientific community by finding six pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton. Broken down into smaller and smaller particles, "it is insinuating itself into the bottom of the food chain," he worries. Larger pieces are probably eaten by albatross and other birds. And since plastic is a sponge for pollutants such as PCBs and other chemicals which are estrogenic, Moore worries, "we are changing the sex of the ocean and its creatures," feminizing them. SEEDS OF CHANGE: BRISTOL, a project by MARIA THEREZA ALVES.
Ballast flora grow from the seeds caught up with the sand, rocks, earth and other debris used to balance cargo ships. This was common practice during the period that Bristol was an active port and ballast would have been off-loaded in and around the water’s edge. Like on-board stowaways, the seeds are unofficial travellers on these journeys. Information panels and paintings are examples of plants that have made the journey. They were identified in Bristol during the period 1912-1929. Alves studied this information at the City Museum and Bristol Records Office as part of her research for this project. An important aspect of this project has been the nurturing of the plants, carried out by a wide range of people in Bristol, including British Conservation Trust Volunteers and many people with experiences and stories about migrating to Bristol. They are represented in photographs of them with their plants. SNAIL MAIL, Boredom Research, 2007
Where an individual can visit the 'Real Snail Mail' website and email a message which travels at the speed of light to our server where it is entered into a queue. Here it waits until a snail wonders in range of a hot spot. The hot spot is our dispatch centre in the form of a RFID reader. This reader identifies the snail from the RFID chip attached to its shell and checks to see it has not already been assigned a message to carry. If the snail is available it is assigned the message at the top of the list. It then slips away into the technological wasteland. Located at the other end of the pond (in the case of aquatic snails) is the drop of point. When, or if, the snail ever makes it here, it is identified by another reader, which then forwards the relevant message to the recipients email address; once again travelling at the speed of light.
2007, A 25-yard 'tunnel of love' - painstakingly constructed to link two separate dormice colonies - has been shunned by the endangered rodents. Not a single dormouse has scuttled along the leaf-stuffed mesh tunnel slung over a road in Batts Combe Quarry in Cheddar, Somerset. The tunnel was supposed to help the two colonies meet, breed and create a larger, healthier population of hazel dormice, which have distinctive thick, fluffy tails and spend most of their lives asleep. The corridor has been a hit with other woodland residents, in particular squirrels, which regularly scamper along it.
Some training would allow humans to acquire a capacity for smell similar to dogs (or through perception enhancing drugs?). Art for Animals Paul Perry, “Predator Mark” (1995)
Call <-> Response, 2007, by tEnt [Tanaka Hiroya + Cuhara Macoto], with technical support by Kamiyama Yusuke
Anthony Hall Enki, (2006) Louis Bec’s Ichthyophonie / PanGea is an unrealised attempt to develop a communication network between two families of fish using electric signaling, location finding and echoperception. The Mormyrids in located in South America and Gymnarchids in West and Central Africa, originally sharing an early common ancestor, were split apart into different phylogenetic branches by the movement of continental plates. The plan involves setting a network of sensors / actuators in the habitats of these fish which are to be connected to each other via internet. This would allow the communicatory behaviours of these fish, at least those transferable by such means, to enter into some kind of sense of co-location with the possibility for sensorial interplay: perhaps, evoking and probing remnants of shared signalling. Relationships Ecomedia: Ecological Strategies in Today's Art Matthew Fuller, Art for Animals, 2007. Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College. Jussi Parkki, the insect man, Anglia Ruskin University Ecology and Art at the Cultural Frontier, Linda Weintraub with Skip Schuckmann 2006 Kerry Morrison - http://www.morrison-prowse.com References Gregory Bateson, “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”, 1972. Gerhard von der Emde, sensory ecologist Herbert Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” in Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972) p. 59. |
