Critical Zone Observatory

Personal Ecologies: The Community Gardener explores the imagination of an ecosystem. In response to the conditions of global warming, there is a call to all for ‘Climate Action’. The video game and sculpture in this exhibition respond to this call through partnership between art and the ecological practice of a community gardener. Through an interactive game environment, you are invited to explore entanglements of people, plants, animals and machines. As these characters spill from the screen into the gallery’s ecosystem, novel narrative imaginaries render us as actors in a new ecology.

PARTNERS

'a-space' Arts

Arts University Bournemouth

University of Westminster

Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton

PARTICIPANT

Kelly Willcocks of St. Deny's Front Garden Plus

This exhibition from Critical Zone Observatory speculates on the personalities, relationships and experiences of the sensors that make up a weather station. We experience our environment not just with our five human senses but also with the mechanical sensors that act as extensions to our own bodies. These sensors gather massive amounts of data on the Earth’s climate and provide a networked global context for our local experience. However, these mechanical sensors are not the pure machines of reason and hard facts that their chromed steel and grey plastic might suggest, they also carry the bias, emotion, hopes and dreams of their human makers.

Through animation, mechanical climate sensors voice the accounts of couples discussing their experience of weather: how it affects their mood, social life, eating habits and holidays. The sculptures propose new designs for weather stations influenced by the existential drama of our climate. These characters suggest a blurring of the boundary between human senses and mechanical sensors. Together with a newly commissioned mural for the outside of the gallery created in partnership with street artist Roo, the artworks explore the potential for the machines that we use to measure our environment, to also become a handle on the incomprehensibly massive object that is our global climate. In re-evaluating the aesthetics of the weather station, we can hope to devise new, entangled relationships between humans, machines and our atmosphere.

Twisting Metal with Earth explores how weather stations can be useful beyond their function as mechanical sensors. It suggests the potential to also act as an aesthetic interface with the hyperobjects of big data and global climate. The video’s animated characters are voiced by interview recordings from couples discussing their experience of weather. One interviewee collected and shared data from his own weather station, others gave more experiential accounts. From the characters’, a conversation emerges that blurs the boundaries between global systems and local experience. Mechanical climate sensors and plants are discussed by the characters as useful objects to think through large and complex topics.

A climate sensor sculpture installed in the New Forest, an anthropomorphic sculpture supporting delicate instruments: anemometer, barometer, thermometer and rain gauge. These machines are designed to act as extensions to our human bodies, amplifying our understanding of the environment of which we are a part. Through this combination of sculpture and machine, the work blurs boundaries of sense and sensor, and to question the objective supremacy of digital data. Mechanical sensors, far from benign, are imbued with human bias and offer a reading of our environment that feeds back data on the human imagination. An outcome of motor car infrastructure is a detailed climate map generated by an integral network of roadside weather stations. Known to the Highways Agency as Environmental Sensor Stations, these machines report on local road conditions and inform the way we navigate our environment. The feedback of climate sensor and climate agent creates a poetic loop.

2019

Climate sensors, stainless less steel tube (chromed), sports vest, nylon tattoo sleeve, sandbag

200 x 50 x 45cm

The sculpture is presented alongside a graph of the climate data for the gallery in which it stands.

This data is then interpreted as a song. In this performance Andy Weir selected ‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd.

2019

Climate sensors, clear acrylic, stainless less steel tube, tripod, tie-dye t-shirt

180 x 120 x 45cm

The sculpture gathered climate data of the conference hall in which it stood. This data was then interpreted in a live musical performance, guided by the ‘voices’ of the sculpture and the building’s intelligent cooling system. The performance was entitled Specificities of the Planetary Room and took place Bath Spa University as part of the Digital Ecologies: Fiction Machines conference.

Commissioned by Richard Wentworth for the Black Maria project, this video projection featured a performance by the Force Majeure choir. The event was part of Relay, a three year art programme based in Kings Cross. The performance was recorded at The Granary, Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London.

The video is a computer generated visualisation, a fantasy island inspired by an interview with a scientist working on the decontamination of the site of the 2012 London Olympics. The scientist describes the technicalities of landscaping an ex-industrial site polluted by chemical industry and munitions manufacturing. His voice over describes the bucolic picturesque scene they dream of creating, whilst the contaminates of history are buried beneath the ‘pink layer’.

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