Critical Zone Observatory

TWISTING METAL WITH EARTH, 2020. Digital video, Dur. 10 mins 6 seconds

The video Twisting Metal with Earth was produced to explore how weather stations can be useful beyond their function as mechanical sensors. It was suggested that they also act as an aesthetic interface with the hyperobjects of big data and global climate. The video’s animated characters were 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 emerged that blurred the boundaries between global systems and local experience. Mechanical climate sensors and plants were discussed by the characters as useful objects to think through large and complex topics.

CLIMATE DATA KARAOKE, 2020 (Installation shots). Climate sensors, aluminium tube, sandbags, clothes and accessories.

CLIMATE DATA KARAOKE, 2020. An exhibition of climate sensor sculptures at Kiosk7, Copenhagen. Thanks to the students of Arts University Bournemouth who assigned karaoke songs to the climate data collected from the sculptures. The graphs became scores, that were performed at the opening of the exhibition.

PARASITE, 2020. Climate sensors, resin coated sandbag, powder coated steel, ratchet straps. 75 x 50 x 50cm.

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.

THE PINK LAYER, 2013. (Excerpt 44 sec) Digital Video, 10 min 39 sec.

Directed by Harry Meadows. Visual Effects by Harry Meadows and Sam Wilkins. Choral arrangement by Force Majeure. 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’.