For scientists: Ecology is the study of interactions among organisms and their environment, such as the interactions organisms have with each other and with their abiotic environment.

 Post-Nature ecologies

Today the word ‘ecology’ is used in many contexts, and this term encompasses a far wider set of ideas than an external ‘nature’ or ‘environment’.

Recent ‘ecological’ art emerges from the age of the ‘post-nature condition’ as announced by T.J Demos in Artforum (April, 2012).

Ecology suggests interconnecting paradigms that may be social, creative, psychological, environmental and informational (Bateson, 1973; Guattari, 2000; Latour, 2004; Morton, 2007; Fuller, 2007; Stengers, 2010).

For sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, if the environment is represented as a passive subject to be acted upon, rather than a mutable, generative ecology, we analogically render it ‘speechless’

Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature, 2004: 86.  

Isabelle Stengers, ‘Introductory notes on an ecology of practices.’

Stengers notion of ‘an ecology of practices’ is addressed to many diverging practices and their practitioners as a ‘tool for thinking’ beyond disciplinarity. Such tools operate at the level of slight shifts; the ‘minor key’ rather than the ‘major key’ that involves ‘thinking through the middle’ without defining boundaries.

“An ecology of practices does not have any ambition to describe things ‘as they are’; it resists the master word of progress that would justify their destruction. It aims at the construction of new ‘practical identities’ for practices, that is new possibilities for them to be present, or in other words to connect. It thus does not approach practices as they are -- physics as we know it for instance -- but as they may become.”

Stengers, I, ‘Introductory notes on an ecology of practices.’ Cultural Studies Review. Vol 11, No. 1 March (2005).

How do you find collaborators?

What are some of the constraints or risks in cross or interdisciplinary collaboration?

What hierarchies still remain?

neighbourhood air (2011-2012)

Even in New Zealand, a small island state with limited industrial activity and surrounded by a relatively pristine environment, air quality regularly exceeds the National Emissions Standards for nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. The global implications of ‘the age of atmospheric toxins’ (Peter Sloterdijk) means that we can no longer rely on our primary surroundings.

Brown haze is caused by Nitrogen Dioxide and particulate matter. The air also contains other pollutants that are harmful, but invisible, such as Carbon Monoxide.

collaborators

Dr Jennifer Salmond, Urban Meteorologist, University of Auckland. Dr Jennifer Dirks, School of Population Health, University of Auckland Aeroqual technicians; Geoff Henshaw, Greer Laing, John Wagner Chris Manford, Server Mechanism, Unitec Jeff Nusz, freelance programmer. Jason Johnston, Nick Farrands, sound composition and mastering public contributions of air quality stories

neighbourhood air

The project utilized three SM50 air quality sensors from Aeroqual connected to an Aeroqual AQM controller. The controller was originally set-up to poll the sensors periodically and save the results onto a memory card that would later be removed and results analysed.

The sensor array was installed in a disused traffic control hut on Symonds St (Auckland CBD) measures common air pollutants mainly emitted by combustion of fossil fuels;

NO2 (Nitrogen Dioxide) CO (Carbon Monoxide) VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds)

as well as temperature, humidity and time of day.

Auckland Council Webcam image for photoanalysis, brown haze. Postcard Feedback.

table of incidents, projectspace, Elam, 2011

chromatic hue / air quality / sound correlation

There are chromatic hue/ratings of haze severity has an associated sound tone that gives a rating taken from Photographic images.

The sounds also represent the different gases that are collected.

Auckland Council website

Aeroqual handheld sensors (SM50)

Here ready for permanent deployment in California to monitor ozone exceedances.

Ground level ozone (the primary constituent of smog) is not emitted directly into the air like other pollutants. Ozone is created by sunlight acting on Nox and VOC in the air.

CO2, Carbon Dioxide is released when Fossil fuels are burned. The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is causing global warming.

Commercial visualisation using Aeroqual sensors in real time (Spain)

neighbourhood hope index (work-in-progress)

Historically and today the airshed above Christchurch has a problem of regular exceedances of particulate matter (PM10 ).

Can this be ameliorated in the emergent smart infrastructure of the transitional city in Christchurch, where the instrumental measurement of traffic flows, water quality, air quality and urban weather can be monitored by such devices as the SM50 air quality monitors.

Atmosphere or air is considered in social terms as well as in bio-physical terms, ie the phrase ‘an air of calm’; community hopes and fears, ‘neighbourhoods of relations’

an uneasy interface between media art, social research and information systems.

Christchurch today postcard collection of stories about air quality  

Andrea Polli; a simple, real time animation of particulate pollution levels in San Jose. The number of ‘drops’ on the screen is linked to current levels of particulate matter.

This site also provides links to archived air quality information from the local Bay Area Air Quality Management District and national Air Now program.

Andrea Polli, Particle Falls, San Jose, 2010  

Theorist Jennifer Garbys suggests that sensors provide orders of sensation that flow beyond the body to the urban infrastructure itself as an automatic, ‘collective’ sensorium.

She suggests that by managing urban environments sensors effectively make environments that construct or recast orders of sensation.

She asks, “Can sensor networks, as one of the more pervasive of these technologies, eventually realign our sensory taxonomies, so that sight, touch, smell, taste and sound are augmented and extended by registers of light, temperature, location and motion?”

Jennifer Gabrys, ‘Automatic Sensation: Environmental Sensors in the Digital City’, Berg: The Senses and Society vol.2 no.:2, 189-200 (July 2007)

Amy Balkin, Public Smog website, ‘Let’s make the atmosphere a World Heritage Site’

“Sensors are not prostheses to the body, in the literal sense but prostheses to the city”

According to Jennifer Garbys in artworks [such as Public Smog] or in scientific representations [airbase] different cities emerge,

“ where the sensors do not just simply replace or extend the limitations of the human senses but “articulate and shift the field of sensory awareness.”

Body of Water, A Manukau Harbour event, Cardwell Art Collective, Water and Weather group (November 2014)

Water and Weather group also includes: Eu Jin Chua, Lisa Reihana, Dr Ruth Watson, Dr Sarah Treadwell, Nicholas Spratt, Janine Randerson. Supported by Creative Communities funding and Te Tuhi Gallery.  

AUT School of Engineering's design and creative technologies lecturer Boon-Chong Seet explored the idea to tag a body of water which is moving - to follow the journey of rainwater and sewage into the harbour, using a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip.

What can artists achieve by working with ecological issues?

The small-scale and situated project, rather than the large conceptual scheme, may be appropriate to an interdisciplinary art practice.The modest approach to collaboration between artists, scientists and community groups and ‘things’ is less about dismantling than providing the conditions for interconnections.

Dialogue and alternative affects to the representational strategies of mainstream media around key ecological issues.

“Rather than remaining trapped within reductive paradigms, ecological artist’s platforms draw attention to the intricate and inextricable relations between the social and ecological. …And precisely through this complexity, a more radical, just and sustainable ecological politics becomes imaginable.”

Emily Eliza Scott, ‘Artist’s Platforms for New Ecologies.’ Third Text, Jan 2013