suggestions

I gave a talk today at NERI for a group of around 15 scientists about my work and my as-yet unrealised project for IMPACT 09. I showed them a very primitive animation that I made with ArcGIS and the harbour porpoise kernal home-range areas which I was trying to make a little more washed out and watery than the sharp-edged maps favoured here. I also showed them images of my previous work.

I offered to take questions at the end - but the scientists responded more enthusiastically to my request for 'suggestions' as to directions I could take the artwork. Rune was keen that I look at the sound track of the bio-sonar clicks which porpoise use for orientation. Susi suggested that I think about projecting on water which is the natural habitat of the harbour porpoise - while Christian suggested using ice as a sculptural material. He also warned that you need to be careful not to let the technology outweigh the imagination or the art of the piece. I guess it was important for me to learn how they do things on this residency and now I can go away and think about how I will process all this information I have gathered.

bio-meteorology

Peter lent me a book called 'bio-meteorology: weather and life' which is useful for connecting together my previous studies of meteorology with the work the scientists are
doing with plant and animal species. Meteorological conditions and particularly snow and ice cover are taken into account when assessing animal patterns. I had a long talk with Jesper about how climate change is affecting bird migration patterns. When spring comes early and the Eider birds (for example) are genetically programmed to reach a certain resting ground at a certain time - they can starve or their breeding patterns can be effected by missing crucial insects that come with the plants at the onset of spring.

Jesper also outlined the important role of the ground observers who note the banded birds and report back to NERI when they spot them from all around the world forming a global network of human-bird interaction.

hand drawn

Before satellite imaging the scientists made hand drawn visualisations such as this one of Christian's from Greenland. These are also appealing to me for their simplicity and graphic use of symbols. This map (1978) is made from Inuit descriptions of polar bear and ice relations.

U-turn

My stay in Copenhagen is accidentally well timed to fit in with the first Copenhagen Contemporary Art Biennale called 'U-TURN' . Most of it was in the Carlsberg factory - a huge complex with 19th C buildings and manufacturing plants. The opening had a lot of Carlsberg product of course and an after-party in converted vats where 6 bands played the same song at once. The theme of the Biennale is cultural translation and 'The New Europe'. There were some really strong political pieces (ie Dansk songbooks which told immigrants they would never be Danish by Korean-born artist Jette Hye Jin Mortensen) - I sense that there is a lot more openly political work here than we might see in Australia and New Zealand. (I am also thinking about work in the show at the Copenhagan State gallery called 'Reality Check' which opened last Tuesday.)

Tove Storch's "humming bird" (2007) at the gallery entrance is an illusion of flight created by two images rapidly revolving on a motor in positive and negative. A simple, very effective piece which evokes a nineteenth century optical toy.


Lillibeth Cueneca's dramatic performance 'How to break the Chinese Wall' was a series of re-enactments of performance art from the 1960s performed to a lulling sountrack as she moved rapidly from one iconic performance to the next - seemingly commenting on how the artworld consumes novelty. I thought her performance persona was very captivating, she is originally from Manilla and living in Copenhagen.

One of the other U-TURN venues is the Nicolaj church in the city centre which also will be a venue for IMPACT (the exhibition that results from my residency). Nicolaj had an evocative series of 16mm films translated to DVD installation of Jesper Just -voyages into psychological spaces realised in architectural spaces. The space has an old staircase running through it which leads into the rafters of the church - which dates back to the 13th century.

negative land (from A to B)

I am interested that in most of the maps of the harbour animals show the land as a black negative space on the map or a colourless space. The attention for NERI mapwork is on the sea. These maps show points where GIS uploads have been made to the internet. Susi explained that these maps were not the most useful for the scientists although they are useful for the public for explaining the Narwhal movements they do not show what the animals do in-between the dots. The 'straight-line' visualisations would be even more organic if they could include the dives, the trips to sure and the round about way the animals really move from place to place.

I learned from Peter how to upload GIS data which has been converted by a programme called ArcVector from Vectotronics to importable files for google earth and to make animations of the movements of the tracks in a much faster way than using ArcGIS. The Neri scientists will map snow and ice movements and weather onto the animal movements to show the correlation. Below is fresh data from Reindeer in Western Greenland which can be animated live in Google Earth.


I also spoke to Doris today who went on a mission to Greenland to find out about the less high profile creatures and plants and shellfish that live at the bottom of the sea. These also need to be considered in environmental assessments for energy companies.

ArcGIS and ethics

Today I worked with Susi on some more GIS data from the harbour porpoise. She was very generous with her time in teaching me how to work with Satellite coordinates (attributes) and to create 'kernal home ranges' from point data. We used an extension called 'hawth's tools' for making these shapes that show the high density areas for the animals. I have a pretty thorough understanding of the data and also the difficulties obtaining accurate data (for example only when the satellite transmitters send a signal to the satellite on the right angle is a reading collected.) We are working with numerical data gathered over 10 years and condensed into monthly maps to show behaviour of a small number of the tagged creatures. The porpoise are not caught specifically for tagging - the scientists wait until the animals are caught accidentally in fisherman's nets - then the fishermen notify NERI and they rush out to apply their transmitters to the animals. The transmitter is attached through the dorsal fin - it is painful but they have documented that they heal quickly and show no obvious distress at their technological prosthesis. I have some natural reservations about the process but the scientists have me pretty convinced that they have no better leverage for protecting marine areas from exploitation than the data documentation of the animal movements. There is no doubt that this research method is intrusive and there are some ethical questions but this tension still makes this research important to examine creatively. There is a strange feeling of responsibility to be working with data that certain animals have involuntarily carried out as research for their species. But this is a very different scenario to say, drug testing research which is carried out on animals simply to solve human problems. I am thinking about this...



Susi thinks my first visualisation (using GIS software) uses a poor choice of colours - I agree but now at least I know how to do it and I can begin working on my own animation.

lunch time bird people

On a lunch time walk some of the scientists who are interested in bird life leave their desks (where they are generally working on articles and write ups/statistics of their field work in Greenland) and walk around to Roskilde fjord where a variety of local birds - including the indigenous white swan are congregating. The other scientists call them the bird people. The Risø complex where NERI is based also houses other Danish scientific research areas. I was struck by the 2 decommissioned nuclear power plants, left over from 1950s tests at the area. Now the Danes are much more interested in wind power and there are also banks of solar panels around here. I have a security card and complex insurance policy to be on site so I am guessing that there is still some potentially sensitive activity. There are a few closed boxes like this where I wonder what happens inside...

farming the wind