Call for papers
Between Reason and Sensation: Antipodean Artists and Climate Change
Climate change. Its effects seen from outside.
- Name: Janine Randerson
- Country: New Zealand
- E-mail:
- University: Unitec, West Auckland
Abstract:In Aotearoa New Zealand the weather is news; the daily updates on "burn time" from the sun, the diminishing ice in Antarctica, the receding glaciers and the refugee arrivals from the atolls of Tuvalu are never far from the headlines. Climate change presents an immediate threat, yet a lack of community mobilisation reflects the difficulty of rationally conceiving the enormity of the issue. Drawing on my experience as a New Zealand artist who has collaborated with meteorologists, I argue that artists may enter climate change discourse by translating (or mis-translating) objective scientific methods into sensory affect. The paper examines three recent art projects from Australasia, "Anemocinegraph","'The Ice Tower" and "Talking about the Weather". A comparison is made between these works and a community art project on climate change published in the online magazine 'Small Islands Voice' from Southern Polynesia. Although these works engage with logocentric scientifi!
c practices they also extend into subjective, analogical interpretations of empirical data to dissolve the classical reason/emotion binary.
The paper cites Herbert Marcuse's essay "Nature and Revolution" (1972) which argues that sensation is the process which binds us materially and socially to the world. I suggest that these examples of art/science collaboration support Marcuse's idea that an emancipation of the senses stimulates an understanding of nature as 'subject-object', a life force intimately connected to human beings and technologies rather than as 'object-to-be-exploited'. My 2006 project "Anemocinegraph" and Nola Farman's work "The Ice Tower" (2000) both harness data from NOAA Satellite-17, our local satellite, to produce experiential media. "Anemocinegraph" is an installation comprising of six hemispheric projection screens with slowly animated satellite images of local weather transmitted from space. The sound pulse is based on micro-meteorological data from a sonic anemometer at a solar powered weather station that monitors carbon emissions in New Zealand's North Island. Nola Farman's frozen 'Ice Tower' contains water rising and falling according to satellite relay of tide levels at the sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island off the coast of Australia. Drawings by Rarotongan children published in the 'Small Islands Voice' also reveal perspectives that could not have been imagined without satellite technology. Finally, I discuss Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark's current project 'Talking about the Weather' which I encountered in Taranaki, New Zealand, as an example of the impossibility of regarding nature as 'other'. This project considers the effect the human body has on the planet by collecting breath, both conceptually via a blog and by personal encounters with people on the streets. There is poignant pseudo-objectivity in the strategy of collecting our own carbon emissions to counter global warming. In Marcuse's words, artists are negotiating both 'imagination, as knowledge' and scientific data to operate in the space between reasonable and sensational responses to a changing biosphere.
