Justina Alexandroff
As my report was attunment, when i was sat on a bench in frome listening to the original of Further Along, i thought about harmony. where is there harmony in natures sound? how could I make non sounding ecology make sound? how could I make that sound harmonious?
found this website called pixelsynth. turns 2D images into audio and has some interactions as you can fiddle with what kind of synth and the amount of notes etc.
More successful prints of the gills (portobello mushrooms – bought, grown in Ireland)
Thinking about latent ecology. In the way that air conditions are invisible… I’m interested in ways of exposing previously invisible traces as a way to aesthetes these things. Not entirely sure why yet…
(foraged ink cap mushrooms, somerset)
Now that my context report is handed in, I am trying to distill my thoughts around my studio project. My thoughts in terms of output are emerging into to (very vague) areas.
thankfully these becomes very interlinked. dying textiles with red cabbage in order to collect soil samples through a process that autographically registers its latent qualities (ie acidity) is both allow for a different way to sense ecology (avenue A) and an indicator of unhealthy environmental conditions (avenue B; a localised example of infrastructures such as toxic manufacturing systems or argolostics)
alexandra daisy ginsberg…
letting the mushrooms print their spores
oka before ash you in for a splash, ash before oak and you’re in fo a soak. many sighs show us whether the spring has been unusually warm. this might be birds nesting earlier because trees are reacting to their soundings – there may not be enough food for it. If the oak leafs first every year, the ash is at a disadvantage. Could effect biodiversity if the oak is wining all the time
However, it is not just different environments, but also biological species that might serve as autographic visualisations of climate emergency. Jennifer Gabrys, for example, writes about organisms as environmental proxies and indexes of ecosystem conditions: ‘[…] indicator species of lichens and mosses and other organisms that can be studied as expressions of environmental processes, whether for atmospheric pollutant levels, radioactivity, or different types of mineral depositions in soil’ (Gabrys 2016: 124). This means that, for example, the proliferation of jellyfish species in the oceans turns their skyrocketing population growth into the autographic diagram of global ocean acidification. The same idea is expressed by Offenhuber (2019) when he refers to synthetic biology as offering possibilities to design objects and organisms with autographic qualities. So whether by direct (bio-)design intervention or by naturally occurring capacities in some individuals or the whole population of some organisms, they diagram the change that massively influences their modes of existence. This should not be that surprising given how organisms are irrevocably tied to their environment, in a sort of metabolic flux where each life-form stands for the temporary compression of its external conditions, following, for example, von Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt (2010).
Given these examples, we declare the human-made climate emergency as a medium of indication and planetary framing of the archival processes of the Earth, that unfolds through different environments and biological species. Human-accelerated ecological processes thus become a method of autographic design. In opposition to material traces that can be simply observed with some training, the human-induced climate change is a large scale autographic design operation that was not even planned to be one. Without explicit human intention, effects of climate change reveal the unintentional archival processes of human cultural activities by the Earth: a geo-epistemic serendipity which implies non-human processes of distancing and distinguishing that are too sensitive for human perception of the world. Hence, the climate crisis enables a specific mode of more-than-human visualisation to emerge, an opportunity to reveal the dimensions of the memory space of the Earth itself.
This ‘tragedy’ might be further conceptualized in Virilio’s (2003, see also Bratton 2006: 21) vocabulary of integral accidents, where every technology is treated from the point of view of the new genre of the accident it generates: the blackout comes with the electric grid, the plane crash comes with the aeroplane. If images are nowadays technical tools rather than simple representations – as it is in case of operational images – even images and visualisation techniques might be judged as bringing a new kind of catastrophe into the world: the disappearance of an external object the image used to relate to. Even planetary imagery then carries its integral accident: our visualisations of the Earth are eating the Earth at the same time they capture it, as it is the technological infrastructure of the vast machine, largely dependent on the fossil fuel industry, that drives the climate crisis modelled by the very same infrastructures (Hu 2015: 79-80). To see the ageing of the tree diagrammed in the tree rings, we cut the tree. To see the planetary dynamics, we set the planet on fire.
From – The Invisible Display – Design Strategies for Ambient Media in the Urban Context – deitmar offenhuber:
‘There are numerous other examples and possibilities – especially plants are an interesting choice for a display medium: they interact with their environment on a number of levels, yet exhibit persistent features such as petal color. Examples of ambient displays include projects that exploit a plants’ phototrophic behavior or the possibility to tint the petals by watering white flowers with colored water.’
THINKING RESEARCH 