This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

In 2014, I wrote a play called Kill Climate Deniers. It’s the story of a group of eco-terrorists who take over Australia’s Parliament House during a Fleetwood Mac concert and hold the entire government hostage, demanding an instant end to climate change. It’s an action/hostage drama with a soundtrack of classic House and Techno from 1988-1992. The play was scheduled for a production with a company in my hometown of Canberra, Australia. We received $19,000 AUD from the local state arts council to do a script development of the work.

As soon as the funding announcement came out, a bundle of right-wing commentators (Breitbart, Infowars, and their Australian equivalents) expressed shock and outrage at the play’s title. A local conservative politician called for the funding to be revoked. It’s a tale as old as time: provocative (clickbait) artwork meets professional outrage merchants.

The script had been accused of “incitement” by its critics, who had threatened to turn us in to the police. This normally wouldn’t worry me, but the Australian government had recently passed new anti-terror legislation with unclear consequences. It is now illegal in Australia, for example, to incite terror through “reckless use of language.” What does that even mean, and would the play run afoul of it?

Following the burst of media attention, we had to make the hard decision of canceling the Canberra production. I sat down with director Julian Hobba and we made the brutal call that without real financial resources we couldn’t do the production justice, and more importantly, we couldn’t protect our creative team from online blowback. So we shut down the work. And then we went to work.

The next step was to meet with our lawyers. I hired a legal firm to go through the script line by line to make sure there was no material that could blow up in my face. Expensive—$2,800 AUD to get the whole thing vetted—but really interesting to get that legal perspective. (And cheaper by far than going to court.) Once I’d gotten the all-clear that there was nothing in the work that could land me in jail, the next step was to tackle the media-sphere. Before this play could ever be produced, there needed to be content in the public domain that countered the rhetoric being blown about by the outrage merchants and climate deniers.

We put together a package of other material: an album (with musician collaborator Reuben Ingall), a short film (with my brother Tom Finnigan), an ebook, and a website(with designer friends New Best Friend).

When I say “album,” what I mean is, we recorded the whole script as a radio play (directed by Julian Hobba). Then Reuben composed an album of techno bangers, in the style of classic early ’90s rave music, and sampled dialogue from the radio play the way dance music often samples dialogue from movies.

This all-digital content meant that anyone who wanted to could access the work, instead of relying on what journalists had previously written. Putting this together took thousands of hours of work throughout 2015-16, and the contributions of many friends and collaborators who volunteered their time.

I gambled on the notion that the little flare-up of controversy around the play’s funding would result in an audience for the digital material. I was wrong. The album and ebook had to build up an audience more or less from scratch.

Photo by Sarah Walker.

We started at the You Are Here Festival in Canberra in April 2016. We held a panel to talk about political art (and whether it should ever be government funded), and then had a no-holds-barred dance party DJed by Reuben to launch the website and the first single from the album. I also did a solo retelling of the work.

When the album came out in September, we launched it with a special listening party at Parliament House. Unescorted audience members walked through the House listening on headphones to an audio tour style version of the album, complete with gunfire and explosions, in the parts of the building where the story takes place. That was an interesting hook that garnered us some good coverage, so that if someone Googled Kill Climate Deniers, they wouldn’t just find a bunch of angry blather on Breitbart or Infowars. Now the ground was clear for a company to actually produce the script.

Musician Reuben Ingall at Parliament House Listening Party. Photo by Sarah Walker.

Clearing all that nonsense to one side, though, brought back to light two key issues that had been obscured in the back and forth with the right-wing media.

1.  Is the play any good?

Controversy doesn’t mean you’ve written a good play. You can have a clickbait title and an attention-grabbing conceit, and have written a total piece of trash.

Some of my closest collaborators, the people whose opinions I trust more than my own, pushed me to keep forging ahead. First through the small amount of resistance, and then through a great deal of public indifference, they insisted that the work was interesting, funny, fun, and worth producing. They kept me pushing the project forward, finding new ways to animate the work and manifest it in the world. One of the points of having close collaborators is that you can trust them when you can’t trust yourself, so I did what they said, and finished the play.

In June 2017, the play was awarded the Griffin Playwriting Award. This September, it’s getting its first run in Long Beach, California, thanks to The Garage Theatre, in March 2018 it’s being produced by Griffin Theatre in Sydney. So, I’m telling myself that my friends weren’t wrong, it was worth it to persevere. But you never know for sure, and one of the ridiculous things about our art form is that you have to balance total conviction in your own practice with the deep certainty that you’re also a terrible writer and you’ve got a long way to go.

2.  Is this play counterproductive?

Some very thoughtful people, including my mum, said that calling the play Kill Climate Deniers is needlessly antagonistic, reinforces tribalism and aggression between left and right, and does harm to the climate movement. This is what someone commented on a Guardian article about the show:

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people will react to the title, having never or being ever intentioned to watch the actual play…That’s how you unintentionally mess the world up in a direction that runs opposite to your initial objectives.

Is this true? Maybe. But how do you measure these things? Certainly, this work isn’t going to change anyone’s mind, but it was never about that.

Kill Climate Deniers uses the right-wing deniers to amplify the conversation around the work in order to access some of the many people who’d never come see a play “IRL,” but who might read an article about a “controversy.” Artists can’t control what happens in that media-sphere—the best we can do is ride the wave—but putting the work in that public space does put us in dialogue with a huge number of people we’d never have connected with otherwise. We don’t have to be pleading for column inches—we can be smart, we can make our own platforms, however compromised they may be.

I think, as artists, we can make the media work harder for us.

“But David, if most people reading about the work just hear a clickbait title and see some right-wing anger, aren’t you switching off people who might otherwise be productively engaged in climate activism.? Aren’t you worse off than when you started?”

Maybe. Maybe. I don’t think so, I doubt it, but maybe.

Stay live to that possibility. Keep asking the question. Keep looking for evidence that you’re wrong. Keep being ready to change your mind, change direction if you need to. Keep trying. Keep focused.

Good luck to all of us, I think. Here’s a song for you.

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David Finnigan is a writer, theatremaker and pharmacy assistant from Canberra. He is a member of science-theatre ensemble Boho and an associate of Coney and the Sipat LawinEnsemble. David is a Churchill Fellow and an Australia Council Early Career Fellow. David is online at davidfinig.com.

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

In my recent projects, I have undertaken art-science investigations where a fusion of creative and scientific sensibilities can result in new ways of knowing and enable the emergence of novel approaches to creative inquiry where art and science are on equal footing for research – art informing science and science informing art.

With the overwhelming inundation of complex data, to find our way in the saturated drift that has re-characterized the ecological world, we must explore the possibilities of new sensoria to elucidate meaning and compose and configure accessible and novel interpretations.

My approach in these transdisciplinary investigations has been to facilitate access to new sensoria (sound, image and tangible interactions) to unveil innovative realizations, associations and insights into the fragility of ecological and biological patterns and conditions. These projects have creatively examined the concepts of the re-narration of extinction, the emergence of life, biological time and the essential links of bioculturalism to man’s cosmological placement.

The bio- and ecoinformatic data sources I work with can be from my field sampling, from sources shared with collaborating scientists or from open source public databases from the US, Europe or Asia. Initially my projects build up a sonic or visual foundation that was transcoded from proteomic and/or genomic information – i.e. protein or DNA/genetic sequence data is converted to sonic/visual sequence through custom-built software. I spent a number of years composing media (sonic and video) as works or sound objects from the genomes and/or expressed proteins of extinct or endangered species – specifically, species that were lost to the human hand in the 19th and 20th centuries, and conceivably species that our great grandparents could have seen daily and now we will never witness. This process gives me both a scientific transcoding platform to think and listen through as I further explore immersive content that I need to witness and acquire.

In light of our current environmental circumstances we have been presented with critical prospects for listening. It is implicit that the realizations of climate change will greatly impact acoustic ecologies – the core of acoustic variability is carried by the basic factors of temperature and humidity. On the bioacoustic side the induction of birdsong and auditory pathways is driven by environmental factors. As immediacy – in January 2017 reports of climate warming causing major shifts in the way sound moves in the Arctic Ocean and the Beaufort Sea came in from the scientists at Woods Hole.

A channel in the ocean called the Beaufort Lens will undoubtedly change the acoustic ecologies and communication dependencies for species in this Arctic biome. Our consciousness of the fragility of acoustic ecologies needs even more attention – this erosion is yet one more cascade happening before us, and one that we should now be listening attentively for.

In continuing this creative line of inquiry, in 2016, I became engaged through the National Academies (of Science, Engineering and Medicine) Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) in a collaborative research project with the visionary composer Dr. Jonathan Berger of Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). NAKFI is an initiative aimed at breaking open high-risk and novel ways of collaborating and knowing in the sciences. 2015-16 was the first time NAKFI converged scientists and artists together in their think tank style collectives. Our hybrid investigation, Project ECAT (EcoAcoustic Toolkit), is a collaborative art-science investigation to advance the creative and scientific literacy of ecoacoustics.

To broaden ecoacoustic literacy we are developing new openly accessible digital sound recording hardware and software that can result in the three-dimensional resolution of ecological soundscapes. For example, we are developing methods for the recording of three-dimensional sounds in a number of Western Hemisphere at-risk ecologies where we can characterize the acoustics of a canopy forest space to understand the auralization or the way that sound travels, reflects and resonates in the natural ecological space. Through these methods we can model and archive three-dimensional acoustic environments for later reference for ecological protection and preservation. These tools will be made available to artists, scientists and citizen scientists.

Impulse response recording, Project ECAT, Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Communal Reserve, Amazon primary forest, Loreto Province, Peru.

To date, this project has been fieldwork intensive and has taken our recording sessions to far ranging remote field sites in the Western Hemisphere to spatially characterize the endangered and at-risk ecological soundscapes of the Amazon rainforest, the Peruvian cloud forests, the Cordillera Blanca of the Andes, the California redwoods and the ancient primary forests of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.

Infrared clearcut, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Infrared digital photograph, Timothy Weaver, 2017.

In parallel to my time in the outback, Jonathan has done intensive development and creative work to advanced methods of 3D Ambisonic recording and auralization of archaeoacoustic and architectural spaces in Rome. He has produced multiple installation and new compositional works focusing on the notions of climate change and extinctions in the historical times of the Roman Empire. Project ECAT’s base methods for spatial sound characterization have been adapted from work conducted in the field of archaeoacoustics and primarily informed from a project base investigated at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) by Dr. Miriam Kolar and Dr. Jonathan Abel.

Wayfinding, Quebrada, Quilquewanka, Cordillera Blanca, Peru. Infrared digital photograph, Timothy Weaver, 2017.

In this our final year of this project we are building advanced 3D recording methods, solidifying our archive of auralization and ecoacoustics data and prototyping the ecoacoustic software and hardware toolkits we will be introducing. We are especially excited that we are now applying the results of our tool development and field sampling to new experimental sounds compositions, multimedia performance and interactive installations to creatively convey the fragile nature of ecological soundscapes to public audiences. Our initial prototype works are utilizing voice interactivity in a call-and-response configuration that places a participant’s voice into the virtual space of an endangered ecoacoustic soundscape as they recite classic texts from various cultural insights into the sacredness of forests. Through our custom software and hardware, the audience participant calls into the virtually modeled forest and their own voice responds back to them in the spatial ecological memory of the reanimated space.

The hope is that audience engagement with such immersive experience may re-mediate the patterns of lost ecological memory as a means of facilitating a discourse into the fragility and elusiveness of life in a time of cascading extinctions.

(Top image: ArthropodaChordataConiferophyta, live cinema performance, Timothy Weaver, 2013-15.)

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Timothy Weaver is a new media artist, life scientist and bioenvironmental engineer whose concerted objective is to contribute to the restoration of ecological memory through a process of speculative inquiry along the art | science interface. His recent interactive installation, live cinema, video and sonic projects have been featured at FILE Hipersonica (Brazil), Transmediale (Berlin), New Forms Festival (Vancouver), Subtle Technologies (Toronto), Korean Experimental Art Festival, Museum of Modern Art (Cuenca, Ecuador), the Seattle Center, the Denver Art Museum, Boston CyberArts, SIGGRAPH, the New York Digital Salon & the National Institutes of Health (Washington, DC). Timothy is Professor of Emergent Digital Practices specializing in biomedia, sustainable design and emerging forms of interactive expression at the University of Denver, Denver Colorado.

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

My project if we do nothing began as a simple concept born of a failure to comprehend the endless streams of visual data on climate change. My idea was to sonify climate change data. The dynamics of climate change’s various drivers, for example rising CO2 or disappearing Arctic sea ice, would be represented in sound. I wanted to exploit sound’s advantages over forms of visual representation, principally its potential to afford immediate transformational experiences. Sound, as a phenomenological reality in itself, invites audiences to feel the movement of data, offering unique perceptions of the abstract complexities of climate change data.

Whether this concept was somewhat pessimistic or entirely realistic I can’t say for certain, but the more I looked into developing global scenarios, the more I understood that human-induced climate change is a civilizational problem and that the artistic community is as well placed as any to generate fresh thinking. I came to appreciate some of the differences between strictly media-specific arts and the contemporary eco-arts. The former exists within largely self-enclosed modes of production and presentational forms (I myself work almost uniquely with sound). Art/science collaborations on the other hand thrive on complexity and transdisciplinarity and are often oblivious to the imperatives of the established art world. My research brought me face-to-face with current lines of inquiry into adaptation, sustainability, the conditions and limits of science, and the importance of artistic endeavor in reframing the important questions.

Coding and sonifying climate change data.

I began with “big data” – representations of rising global CO2 and falling glacier mass (Switzerland’s Aletsch Glacier). Data monitoring for these two goes back some time; I chose 1880 as a starting date, around the time when the effects of the industrial revolution kick in, and took forward projections up to 2050, when tipping points are predicted to cause chaotic or irreversible conditions. My initial model, using glissandi (sliding tones), ran into problems having to do with the unpleasant effect of very high frequencies on the ear. I set this model aside and, with specialist assistance, looked instead at pulsar synthesis, an exciting research field in contemporary electronic music. As the name implies the sounds are small pulses or ticks, each with an element of pitch embedded in them. The speeding up and slowing down of the ticks offers a robust and convincing representation of the data sets. The synthesis modules were coded to produce almost infinite variations of the model, as well as a suite of choices with respect to duration and other parameters. Here you can listen to variations of the model with further details.

Next, I developed a model exploring one unique phenomenon. One of my original ideas had been to create a permanent fixed installation that would sonify real-time (or near real-time) data. My cryosphere colleagues gently (but firmly) convinced me that this would be impossible with big data as the changes are too slow to be perceived on scales of less than a decade. We agreed eventually on the idea of investigating arctic sea ice, the volume of which is disappearing at an alarming rate. Revisiting the method of taking historical data and projecting forward using best estimates, I gathered data mapping the disappearance of sea ice from 1980 (earliest records) to 2080, when some predict it will have disappeared altogether. The model uses two tones, high and low, representing ice levels a century apart. A sweeping tone between the two at a user-defined interval emphasizes the difference. The simplicity of these models honors a fundamental principle of sonification.

From Elizabeth Nyman and Jeff Leer, Gágiwduł.àt: Brought Forth to Reconfirm. The Legacy of a Taku River Tlingit Clan.

With large-scale research projects, you often find yourself taking unforeseen detours. I was drawn to a consideration of adaptation from the perspective of indigenous communities living in and around the Arctic rim. With advice from anthropologists and climate scientists at the University of Aberdeen I learned that many such communities, though at great risk, are arguably better prepared, culturally and historically, than urban Europeans to adapt to and survive the effects of climate change. This led me to examine indigenous knowledge systems, myths, and stories of communities living in the North American and Siberian arctic regions. I provided a colleague specializing in these indigenous languages with specific “semantic fields” – key words and concepts around environment, weather, migration, and so forth. He in turn provided me with native language texts, pronunciation notes, and translations. I spent several weeks learning details of pronunciation and intonation, then read and recorded both originals and translation. My recorded voice was synthesized and transformed using customized software. Next, I looked at the United Nations literature for what I’d call “authoritative texts” related to the themes of the indigenous texts. These procedures led me to the largely ethnographic problem of the incommensurability of worldviews, or the porosity of knowledge, for example the differences between Western science and myth in defining and explaining the universe. I took the view that indigenous environmental knowledge, often inscrutable, irrational or non-rational, is itself a form of data (data = something given). A short excerpt of this model, using two bodies of text, can be auditioned here. 2019 will see a longer four-channel immersive work based on four bodies of text.

My fourth model takes me to (near) real-time data sonification. Where I live in the semi-rural Scottish Borders, the air is assumed to be relatively clean. I’m currently looking at ways of gathering, contrasting, and sonifying air pollution data from both rural and urban monitoring sites. To complicate matters, an environmental agency engineer pointed out that the Scottish rural air is often heavily polluted due to the proximity of methane sources (cattle) and drifting pollutants from continental Europe. My hope is that this localized model will ground the debate, drawing in people and communities, fostering discussion around local transport, food production, housing, land use, sustainability, and adaptation. I’m also investigating river level monitoring and the idea of creating sonic warning mechanisms to alert people to possible flood conditions, an undertaking that includes gathering stories from land and river workers around ad hoc adaptations to local effects of climate change.

Listening pavilion, proposed design. Old School Fabrications, East Lothian, Scotland.

All four models will be presented in the first instance as sound installations, with textual and other support. As part of the funding from Creative Scotland, and bearing in mind the importance of public engagement in the project, I had a pavilion designed to house the work. Finally, an open forum has been arranged in Dumfries in February 2018 to design and plan a series of future symposiums on eco-art, the aesthetics of sustainability, resilience, and emergence.

2018 is production year, during which I’ll be seeking partnerships with venues, curators and funders. I welcome any contact and will be happy to provide further details.

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James Wyness works across experimental music, radio art and eco-art. Developed in collaboration with partners from the creative, scientific, academic, engineering and civic communities, his current projects include the sonification of climate change data, and radiophonic investigations into language, the voice and listening. As an eco-artist, his interests converge on future sustainable ecologies, incommensurate epistemologies and conflicting understandings of the environment. His musical practice spans the improvisational, electroacoustic and electronic traditions. He works from a definition of music as an investigation of complexity and instability, a phenomenology of emerging forms manifesting deep-seated anthropological functionality, sound-as-sound over sound-as-sign.

 

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog