Climate Symphony

I was invited to participate in Climate Symphony, an event devised by Disobedient in collaboration with Jamie Perera. It was co-produced by Forma Arts and Disobedient, and supported by Arts Council England and Sculpt the Future Foundation. The event was held at Culture Lab, Newcastle University. Climate Symphony was a live music performance that turned data into a four part symphony to tell the story of what climate change means for humans and their environment through sound.

Some questions we thought about included

Can we use sound as a narrative and reporting tool?

Can we engage and inspire and maintain factual rigour?

The lab brought together scientists, artists, journalists and members of the public to interrogate some of the ideas behind the project and as part of a workshop/lab, we created some initial works to communicate some of the data to a new and wider audience.

The lab was intended as a research and development vehicle to answer key practical and artistic questions around the process by which we can transform data into a narrative symphony.

Schedule

LEARN

Birth of a Climate Dataset: Artists, scientists and data analysts delivered talks on field recording and climate data collection.




Jim Lloyd gave an introduction to his work as a scientist and artist, and discussed some of the challenges he faces with science that led him to art.




Jez Riley French described his approach to field recording and shared some examples of his work.


PLAY

What is the Sound of a Dying Planet? We split into two groups and each group selected a set of climate data and turned that into sound.



This is the data set that we chose (kindly provided by Erin in our group).

We found the averages of points along the timeline and plotted this data into the computer. We used the trends to alter the recordings that Jez from our group had provided.

CHALLENGE

Each group explained the decisions made throughout the process of making the work, discussed the challenges faced, what worked, and what didn’t work. This led to a broader debate about role of sonification in communicating narratives of climate change.


Here is the presentation about the work that I was involved with making.

In the evening we were treated to two performances, one by Kate Carr and the next by Jez Riley French.

It was a really interesting and stimulating day, working with such a range of experts in their field and sharing lots of ideas and raising lots of questions. Thank you to Forma Arts and Disobedient for making it happen and for inviting me to be part of it.

Climate Symphony Lab in Newcastle at Culture Lab, Newcastle University on Saturday 8th July

I have been invited to participate in Climate Symphony a forthcoming event to be held at Culture Lab, Newcastle University in July. Each organiser comes from a different background and their skills and interests have shaped what looks to be a fascinating and pertinent event. Katharine Round works primarily in film, Leah Borromeo is an artist and journalist and Jamie Perera is a composer. Tonight I talked to Katharine about the event and my involvement. 

"Climate Symphony is a creative lab that turns hard data on climate change into a symphony to tell the story of what climate change means through sound.

Journalists, climate scientists, data analysts and sound artists will spend the day collaboratively exploring and discovering how we can change climate change research data into a sound and music composition.

Datasets related to different areas of climate change will be used - issues like air quality & asthma, glacial erosion, flooding, migration patterns and food choices etc.

The days run from 11-6pm. There will be an overview to the data and the scientific principles around its collection and analysis, followed by a longer workshop exploring how data can be translated into sound and the outcomes. Later there will be a discussion between all participants as to the findings of the day.

The event will culminate in a live illustrated performance by leading sound artist Jez Riley French who uses field recordings in the composition of his work, often from places affected by climate change."

If you would like to reserve a place at the event, please contact Philippa Barr on pb@forma.org.uk by July 1st.

Limited capacity so please book early.

Climate Symphony is supported by the Digital Cultures Research Group, Culture Lab, Newcastle University digitalcultures.ncl.ac.uk. Climate Symphony is devised by Disobedient in collaboration with Jamie Perera and co-produced with Forma.

For more information please visit

https://www.facebook.com/events/1551764054894196/?active_tab=about

Generous Interfaces for Cultural Collections - Mitchell Whitelaw

This lunchtime I went to a lecture by Mitchell Whitelaw in which he talked about Generous Interfaces for Cultural Collections.

"After a decade or more of digitisation, the collections of galleries, archives, libraries and museums are increasingly available in digital form. But I argue that our interfaces have not kept up; the standard search-and-list approach demands a query, shows too little, and discourages exploration. In this talk I will introduce and demonstrate what I call “generous interfaces”: rich, explorable, browsable representations of cultural collections."


The first part of the lecture focused on how digital archives can be organised to enable people to engage with a collection and explore it without having a specific area of research or academic background.





Techniques such as grouping associated material and providing images have been used to prompt people to discover different aspects of a collection that they would not have otherwise have looked at.





Australian Prints and Printmaking have an original way of showing their collection, grouped by decades and in the various types of printmaking e.g. intaglio, relief


http://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/explore/decade-summary/






Whitelaw questioned whether we can reintroduce serendipity into digitally, and used serendip o magic as an example








http://serendipomatic.org



The second part of the lecture was about generative interfaces i.e. interfaces that make stuff





I understand this to be DOING something with the information, not purely presenting it, and therefore I see Whitelaw's role as an artist.






http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com





He has used software to follow rules to create an endless collection of images that he hopes will lead people to see the material in different ways and will make meaning.


The software chooses 5 images, applies different effects to them (there is a choice of 3 effects that can be used), and then blends these images together to form a new image. This new image can be sourced back to its original components, and therefore if someone sees the image and goes on to investigate it further, it can lead them to a new area of investigation that they wouldn't have otherwise visited.


Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and practitioner with interests in new media art and culture, especially generative systems and data-aesthetics. His work has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity, Fibreculture, and Senses and Society. In 2004 his work on a-life art was published in the book Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (MIT Press, 2004). His current work spans generative art and design, digital materiality, and data visualisation.

http://mtchl.net