Janine Randerson – Between Reason and Sensation: Antipodean Artists and Climate Change – 2006

Artist

First publication conference Expanding the Space, in collaboration with the
Octubre Centre de Cultura Contemporania, and IAA, Valencia, 2006

Technology, as a social space, may be used to mediate between the human and natural worlds. Drawing on my experience as an Antipodean artist who has collaborated with meteorologists, I suggest that artists may enter climate change discourse by translating (or mis-translating) objective scientific methods and technologies into sensory affect. This paper examines three recent projects from Australasia: my work, Anemocinegraph (2006), The Ice Tower (1998), by Nola Farman and Out of Sync’s project, Talking about the Weather (2006). A comparison is made between these works and a community art project on climate change published in the online magazine, Small Islands Voice from Southern Polynesia. The artists’ strategies include the construction of pseudo scientific instruments and poetic mis-readings or reversals of scientific methodologies. Although the works engage with logo centric scientific practices, their analogical interpretations of data have the potential to destabilize the classical reason/emotion binaries of thought. The common division of art into the realm of the sensual and science into the rational sphere, denies artists the possibility of logically apprehending scientific information. “Thinking” is often perceived as the binary opposite of creating experiences or feelings, the traditional domain of art. Similarly, “nature” is excluded from the world of speech and reason. I propose that the art works under discussion operate in a discursive space between reason and sensation, where each may alter the other.

In Western rationalist culture, ecological concern is often dismissed as dispensible sentiment. Although our popular media feeds on the threat of global warming, New Zealanders have been complacent about taking action to reduce carbon emissions to slow the concentrated build up of greenhouse gases. Unlike other OECD nations, our energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing, our policy framework for managing climate change is currently non existent and we are overly reliant on inefficient cars (1). This affirms ecosophist Val Plumwood’s claim that we are seeing not only a crisis of rationality and morality but also a crisis of imagination. (2). Few are prepared to imagine a warmer, stormier world and most have a weak sense of our embeddedness in the environment. New Zealand’s relative peripherality and our green environmental image has historically allowed us to feel buffered against pollution. While New Zealand’s climate is rising more slowly than the high Northern latitudes, there is still scientific agreement with ‘moderate certainty’ that the East coast of New Zealand will become hotter and dryer, while the West coast will see increasing westerly winds, frequent heavy rainfall, flooding and a higher risk of subtropical cyclones (3). If the current trend of high greenhouse gas emissions continues, by the year 2100 we can expect a forty or fifty centimetre rise in sea level and a loss of an estimated thirteen metres of our coastline, due to the melting sea ice and the expanding waters of the warming ocean. (4) New Zealand climatologist Professor Richard Warrick has recently called climate change research, a “trans-disciplinary” (5) science, as it has ramifications for the economy, politics, social relationships and ethics. The question of how one can mitigate against radical environmental shifts emerges across these diverse areas, including art practice.

Given this context, I was drawn to the fusion of critical theory and radical politics expressed in philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s 1972 essay Nature and Revolution. To return to the discourse of Herbert Marcuse may seem anachronistic; his persona and work are often evoked as symbols of the utopian radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Marcuse goes further than other Frankfurt school philosophers with his emphasis on “the radical transformation of our relationship to nature as “an integral part of the radical transformation of society”. (6) Where postmodernist discourse apparently abandons politics, Marcuse relentlessly critiques the lack of social bonds in advanced capitalist societies, which deny the natural world an existence in its own right, and relegate the idea of liberated nature to poetic imagination. He argues that sensation is the process that binds us materially and socially to the world. I propose that the following examples of art/science collaboration support Marcuse’s idea that an emancipation of the senses stimulates an understanding of nature as intimately connected to human beings and technologies. The idea that art can be an agent for social interaction, rather than existing in a self referential space, has contemporary relevance. In addition, to take a Marcusian perspective on contemporary digital culture, is to be aware of technology’s latent potential for both progressive social change and negatively, for more streamlined forms of social domination. Today, with growing global movements for environmental sustainability and against corporate capitalism and American Imperialism, Marcuse’s political and activist theory has currency. When Marcuse describes the “permanent revolution”, he does not mean a quest for paradise, but more simply, “a more joyful struggle with the inexorable resistance of society and nature.” (7) While there is little place in postmodern thought, quite rightly, for grand claims of emancipation, there are emerging signs of hope in the form of “micro-utopias, and interstices” (8) opening up in the social corpus, to borrow art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s terms.

While on a residency in 2006 in the Waikato region of the central North Island, I began to investigate technologically mediated natural phenomena through the macro-scale images from satellites and the intimate scale of surface observations. A conceptual beginning was the investigation of complimentary methods of creating a ‘world picture’. I was interested in scientific data collection via the ‘top down’ remote perspective from space and the terrestrial process of surface recording. My study examined the effect that a reliance on instruments to augment the senses might have on perception, and to contrast this with unaided, empirical observations. The project involved collecting images from Satellite NOAA 17 and 18 on their southern orbit, from the Landcare ResearchNZ database. At the opposite end of the scale I collected surface ‘eddies’, small divergences in flow that cause a current to double back on itself in water or air. In a chapter of his recent book Eco Media (2005), Sean Cubitt deconstructs the historical argument that renders nature as “Other”, fundamentally unknowable to the extent that, as object, it cannot be subject and therefore cannot signify. He claims that, in fact, the world does nothing BUT signify. He writes, “To be a world is to effervesce with an excess of signification” (9). In the surface observation of eddies and in the animation of the satellite imagery I wanted to create a mediated encounter with this “effervescence.”

The issue of climate change emerged through my research into intimate scale weather fluctuations. Professor David Campbell at the Earth and Ocean Sciences Department at the University of Waikato introduced me to the science of micro-meteorology. He invited me to a weather station research project that he was supervising for his student Susanne Rutledge. The project monitors carbon emissions from soil respiration in an area that had been mined for peat in Torehape in the central North Island. According to Rutledge’s research for her PhD proposal, soil respiration is the main pathway for carbon moving from the ecosystem back into the atmosphere. In recent years the eddy covariance technique has emerged as an alternative way to assess carbon exchange between the atmosphere and the land surface. (10) Natural peatlands are an important sink for CO2 but peatlands that are drained, harvested and finally abandoned are often found to be a persistent source of CO2. Measurements at the solar powered weather station at Torehape are made with a sonic anemometer and an open path gas analyzer: these two instruments combine to measure the heat flux and CO2 flux as a measure of soil respiration. I was provided with audio data from this site during the period of my residency. The weather data was captured by an eddy logger, turned into a wave form with the programme MatLab and exported as an audio file to be used in a sound composition.

As well as examining current scientific practices in meteorological instrumentation, I researched the historical development of meteorology, with a focus on the period where the goals of artists and scientists were closely linked. In the Nineteenth century natural philosophers could be artists or scientists as they carried out similar empirical investigations into the phenomena of the natural world. Daguerre’s astrophotography (11) or William Turner’s studies of atmosphere were of interest to their contemporaries from art and science disciplines as means of “getting to know” the world. In a book on the development of meteorological instruments I found a description of an eccentric instrument called the anemo-cinégraph developed by Richard Frères in the late Nineteenth century, “…which makes it possible to record the instantaneous speed of the wind.” (12) The installation that developed from the residency imagined this undocumented instrument as somewhere between an anemometer for monitoring wind data and a connecting vehicle between sensory experience and technologically mediated nature. In addition to responding to the scientific data about the physical world from Torehape and from Landcare Research, I wanted to create a space of encounter by appealing to the aural and visual senses. Marcuse’s notion of embodied subjectivity, which deconstructs the opposition between reason and the senses, once central to the modern conception of the subject, was a point of departure.

The resulting installation projects slowly animated satellite images on a round screen, tracing the synoptic scale weather shifts every four hours of each day of each week I spent in the Waikato. The hemispherical screen shapes reference the semiotician Yuri Lotman’s concept of the “semiosphere”. Lotman writes, “The semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture; we justify our term by analogy with the biosphere.” (13) The semiosphere contains overlapping clusters of semiotic spaces that operate as interconnected forms of communication, just as the biosphere has interrelated parts that provide the conditions for the continuation of life. The five smaller screens are empirical video documents of surface observations of eddies in clouds, water and air; the projected images on these smaller spheres overlap at their peripheries as images bleed from one screen to the next. The quality of anamorphosis of the image dissolves the Cartesian grid. The suspension of the screens reconfigures the traditional viewing position to allow the viewer to circumnavigate the image. The pulsing sound bed for the audio track is based on micrometeorological wind data in a composition by sound designer Jason Johnston.

Where I used the anemometer as a conceptual starting place, Australian artist Nola Farman’s project, The Ice Tower, exploits the functional aesthetic of scientific apparatus to create a pseudo instrument. In 1997 Farman and the oceanographer John Bye received a grant from the Australia Council to construct a fully functioning prototype for a kinetic tidal fountain. This instrument was designed to respond to the movement of the tides in the subantarctic Macquarie Island, in the Southern Ocean. Her idea for The Ice Tower emerged as the overwhelming weight of evidence to supporting global warming was made public in the late 1990s. The work consists of a central clear glass tube where seawater rises and falls. At spring tide the water flows over the top of the tube and forms an icecap. John Bye was initially a scientific advisor on the project, but he quickly became a collaborator with input into the science, electronics and facilitation of the project. He formed the connection with the Australian Tidal Measurement group who agreed to provide the flow of tidal data from a remote satellite. David Cranswick observes that many of Farman’s environmental scuptures refer to “the irrepressible quality of water and the process of change”. (14) As silent witness to what Marcuse terms, “the impenetrable resistance of matter,” (15) the tower records the rising sea level regardless of human intervention. According to Farman, her work “represents an opportunity to bring to the public an idea of the relationship of science to everyday life. Art becomes a particular tool in the dynamic representation of this idea.” (16) She provides a space for nature as a subject, a performer, rather than an object of study in her work.

Yuri Lotman states that, “translation is a primary mechanism of consciousness.” (17) To express a scientific idea in the language of art can allow for an alternative understanding of a concept. At the SCANZ artists’ workshop this year in Taranaki, on the West coast of New Zealand, I met the Australian artists Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark, from the art collective Out of Sync. They translate scientific rhetoric and public paranoia surrounding climate change into art. Their motivation for their current project Talking about the Weather (2006) is “sheer terror” (18) at the threat of global warming. Large parts of Australia are in an almost permanent state of drought and they are starting to lose their wheat growing conditions. Like New Zealand’s climate, Australian average temperatures have risen by 0.7 ºC over the last century. (19) Terror, awe and wonder; the language of the aesthetic of the sublime, have frequently been invoked to describe art which responds to natural phenomena. Talking about the Weather aims to poetically demonstrate the “widespread effect we unwittingly have every day on the planet, by collecting breath, both metaphorically via a written blog and by personal encounters with people on the streets.” On the Out of Sync website, internet users can write in describing their breath, and contribute to the “world’s largest breath collection,” (20) to metaphorically counter the effect of the carbon respire on the biosphere. The artists also collect the sound of breath by asking people on the street to breathe into their microphone. Their recent installation at the Govett Brewster gallery in Taranaki included chemist’s phials of breath, empty plinth boxes of breath, and installed wall speakers, which played the sound of breath from their street encounters. The accompanying wall texts contain descriptions of breath printed out from their weblog.

Terrified by a lack of policy initiative to reduce carbon emission levels, despite the pledge of the New Zealand and the Australian governments to the Kyoto protocols, Out of Sync enter the community and ask for passers-by to participate in their social project. In his book Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud identifies modes of art practice that employ social interaction as an aesthetic arena. He articulates a more self-reflexive, less radically rhetorical, return to the political and social engagement advocated by Marcuse. (21) While critic Julian Stallabrass warns the trend for participatory art projects may risk dismissal as merely gestural responses to political issues, (22) Out of Sync’s vox populae method of breath collection, as well as their use of blog site, sidesteps conventional art world structures to allow genuine community participation. Not only their subject matter, but their means of distribution stems from a “radical sensibility” (23) to borrow Marcuse’s expression. This attitude “stresses the active, constitutive role of the senses in shaping reason.” For Marcuse, “the senses are not merely passive, receptive; they have their own “syntheses” to which they subject the primary data of experience.” (24) To ask participants to use donate their breath to combat climate change is illogical, yet the visceral experience of breathing allows a “moment of sociability” (25) and creates a connection with the atmosphere that sustains us.

An art competition to design a poster, open to Rarotongan school children in Avatea and Takitumu, on the theme of climate change, is another example of practical community intervention. According to project convener Imogen Isaci, “the contest encouraged children to look at what individuals can do to lessen the impact of climate change on our islands.” (26) The Small Islands Voice website published the competition results for online distribution. Lazaro Unuka’s drawing represents the round earth as if viewed from space, suggesting a satellite image. The poster depicts carbon belching cars, a smoking first world urban metropolis and a bomb falling on a south sea island. Around the edges of the earth are arrows to demonstrate the interdependence of earth and the biosphere. Pauline Pickering’s drawing is divided into three sections to represent an idyllic island, then the introduction of livestock (which devastated many Pacific island ecologies) and finally a cyclone battered island engulfed by waves, with the slogan, “what effects will our actions today have on tomorrow?” These images are graphic demonstrations of the negative effect that Western instrumentalist rationalism has had on the life giving conditions of Southern hemisphere. The loss of land through a rise in sea level is particularly highlighted by recent immigration trends to Aotearoa New Zealand from Tuvalu. In the last ten years the New Zealand government has accepted almost a thousand citizens from the flat atolls as migrants. (27) The 2006 documentary Time and Tide (28) records New Zealand resident Tuvaluans returning back to their homeland to find that the places they used to live are now under water.

For Marcuse only a reconciliation between the human and the natural will allow human freedom. This idea has a correlative in the Maori word ‘kaitiakitanga’ which embodies notions of responsibility to the earth as subject rather than raw material. The word implies recognition of the fact that humans are only one element of the given world for Pakeha and Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand. Artists have the potential to create social spaces of communication to offset the sometimes alienating effect of scientific practices. Linear reason can be transformed into sensory affect, the cautious warnings of scientists can be amplified or mediated, data can be transformed or playfully misinterpreted. To follow Herbert Marcuse’s idea, the artist’s imagination can become knowledge; an alternative means of knowing the world by using aesthetics as subversive agent.

Notes

(1) – Rod Oram, Financial Journalist. “The Impact of Climate Change on the New Zealand Economy,” A Workshop on Global Climate Change, Parnell, Auckland (Saturday August 26, 2006)

(2) – Plumwood, 98.

(3) – Dr. David Wratt. National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and Chair of Royal Society’s Climate Committee. “The Science of Climate Change,” A Workshop on Global Climate Change, Parnell, Auckland (Saturday August 26, 2006)

(4) – This evidence is based on prediction models set out by Associate Professor Richard Warrick, University of Waikato. “The Impact of Climate Change on the New Zealand Environment,” A Workshop on Global Climate Change, Parnell, Auckland (Saturday August 26, 2006)

(5) – Associate Professor Richard Warrick, University of Waikato. “The Impact of Climate Change on the New Zealand Environment,” A Workshop on Global Climate Change, Parnell, Auckland (Saturday August 26, 2006)

(6) – Herbert Marcuse,“Nature and Revolution.” Counter Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972) 59.

(7) – Marcuse, 71.

(8) – Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002) 70.

(9) – Sean Cubitt, Eco Media, (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005) 117.

(10) – Susanne Rutledge, “ Nutrient Limitation on Organic matter Decomposition by Microbes,” Research Proposal for PhD Thesis (University of Waikato, April, 2005) 5.

(11) – Esther Leslie, “Twinkle and Extra-terrestriality: A Utopian Interlude,” Synthetic Worlds: nature, art and the chemical industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2005) 100.

(12) – W.E Knowles Middleton. Invention of Meteorological Instruments (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1969) 222.

(13) – Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: a semiotic theory of culture, trans. Ann Shukman (London: I.B Tauris and Co. Ltd, 1990) 124.

(14) – David Cranswick, “Bridging Art and Ecology,” ArtLink 18 n.2 (1998): 47.

(15) – Marcuse, 69.

(16) – Nola Farman, “Landscape and Environmental Artworks”, (Australia Council, 1999)1.

(17) – Lotman, 127.

(18) – Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark, Artists Presentation, SCANZ, Western Institute of Technology, Taranaki, New Zealand (July 6, 2006)

(19) – Barrie Pittock, ed., “Climate Change: An Australian Guide to the Science and Potential Impacts,” (2003) Australian Government Department of Environment and Heritage. 15 September 2006.

(20) – Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark, “Talking about the Weather”, (2006) 15 September 2006.

(21) – Bourriaud, 9.

(22) – Julian Stallabrass, Contemporary Art: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 129.

(23) – Marcuse, 63.

(24) – Marcuse, 63.

(25) – Bourriaud, 33.

(26) – Imogen Isaci, “Climate Change Art Competition”, Small Islands Voice, (2004) 17 Spetember, 2006.

(27) – Fact Sheet: “People included on Residence Applications decided by Nationality and financial year of decision (July 1997- September 2006),” 6 September 2006. New Zealand Department of Immigration. 17 September 2006.

(28) – Time and Tide, dirs. Julie Baye, Josh Salzman, prod. Josh Salzman, (U.S.A, 2005)

Bibliography

Abromeit John and W. Mark Cobb, eds. Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002.

Cranswick, David. “Bridging Art and Ecology.” ArtLink 18 n.2 (1998): 46 – 47.

Cubitt, Sean. Eco Media. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005.

Leslie, Esther. “Twinkle and Extra-terrestriality: A Utopian Interlude.” Synthetic Worlds: nature, art and the chemical industry. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.

Lotman, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: a semiotic theory of culture. Trans. Ann Shukman. London: I.B Tauris and Co. Ltd, 1990.

Marcuse, Herbert. “Nature and Revolution.” Counter Revolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972. 59-78.

Middleton, W.E Knowles. Invention of Meteorological Instruments. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1969.

Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Rutledge, Susanne. “ Nutrient Limitation on Organic matter Decomposition by Microbes.” Research Proposal for PhD Thesis, University of Waikato, April 2005.

Stallabrass, Julian. Contemporary Art: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Time and Tide. Dirs. Julie Baye, Josh Salzman. Prod. Josh Salzman: U.S.A, 2005.

(Editor’s Note) The initial text included several links to online references
that are no longer valid and that have been removed in this republication. Those
references can be still visible in the first publication

© Janine Randerson & Leonardo/Olats, November 2006 / republished 2023