MC: Roger Malina
Speaker 1: Roger Malina
Two years ago we opened the ArtSciLab in the Art, Technologyand Emerging Communication at the University of Texas atDallas. I will briefly present our two project areas: a ) DataDramatisation Research and b) Experimental Publishingand Knowledge Curation. In the first I will present our collaborationwith neurobiologist Gagan Wig developing a data stethoscopefor brain connectome data. In second I will present ourCreative Disturbance art-sci platform we are developing podcastsas a form of professional publication.
Speaker 2: Prasad Boradkar - Co-Director of the Biomimicry Center, ASU
Speaker 3: Glenn Weyant - Playing the US-Mexico fence
Performance
Glisten of Places by Matthew Burtner
Percussionist Jeremy Muller will perform Matthew Burtner’s piece entitled
Glisten of Places for percussion and geotagged soundscape recordings. Muller commissioned Burtner, an Alaskan-born composer, to compose a work based on the extreme climates of the Arizona desert and the Alaskan tundra. He created a piece that uses a collection of field recordings as backdrop soundscapes to the percussion part. The percussion part performs the field recordings’ corresponding GPS locations translated into specific rhythms. As a listener, one could decode the rhythms as GPS coordinates and discover that they are listening to how that particular location, on earth, sounds. The performer plays different triangles representing north, south, east, & west, based on the current GPS location of the soundscape being heard. Also, gongs are used as the Northern/Southern hemispheres and specific locations are played on the gongs to indicate exactly where on the planet these recordings took place. An option in the score is to use cameras to overlay images of the earth and projected onto a screen. The audience could then see the performer playing the map, showing them where the recordings were made. The work received its world premiere on December 1, 2014.
Speaker 4: Ofelia Rivas - O'odham elder - on water and life
Speaker 5: Thomas Puleo - Do plants have rights, and if so, what is a vegan to do?
Speaker 6: Ricardo Dal Farra - Balance-Unbalance project
E2Earth - musical performance for http://eartotheearth.org
Speaker 7: Dr. Ken Sweat: Climate Reality Leader
In 2006, Nobel Laureate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore got the world talking about climate change with the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth. It was just the beginning of a climate revolution, and later that year, he founded The Climate Reality Project to take the conversation forward and turn awareness into action. The Climate Reality Project is a diverse group of passionate individuals who have come together to help solve the greatest challenge of our time. They are cultural leaders, marketers, organizers, scientists, storytellers and more, and we are committed to building a better future together.
Today, we know climate disruption is the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. And we know carbon pollution is to blame. But at Climate Reality, we also know that solutions are right in front of us. We can create a healthy, sustainable, and prosperous future by making a global shift from dirty fossil fuels to clean, renewable energies like solar and wind. Our leaders aren’t going to do it on their own. So we’re bringing millions together to make them, demanding change with a collective voice so loud and forceful they have no choice but to help shape the clean-energy future we need.
The Climate Reality Leadership Corps is a global network of activists committed to taking on the climate crisis and solving what is far and away the greatest challenge of our time. The program takes great leaders and makes them exceptional, providing the training in climate science, communications, and organizing to tell the story of climate change and inspire communities everywhere to take action. The result is a dynamic group of world-changers shaping the conversation on climate in forums from family dinners to international summits and building a 21st-century movement for solutions. At Balance-Unbalance 2015, we are happy to host local Climate Reality leader Dr. Ken Sweat, an experienced biologist whose previous work includes natural resource consulting, endangered species surveys and ecotourism ventures.
Performance: Rainwire by Dave Burraston
Rainwire encompasses the cross-cultural investigation of rainfall & its application as a medium for artistic, cultural & scientific exchange. The project includes the development of a prototype Acoustic Rain Gauge using "long wire instruments", and its subsequent expansion through various collaborations in a range of creative, cross-cultural & environmental contexts. This performance will present a live laptop mix of environmental sonification recordings from the newly built
Rainwire prototype. Previous work on
Rainwire has been conducted on shared instruments; this performance will be an opportunity to present the newly built dedicated
Rainwire prototype in public for the first time.
Long-wire instruments are made from spans of fencing wire across the open landscape.
Rainwire was developed from using recordings of rainfall ‘playing’ the long wire instruments for music compositions. This enabled a proof-of-concept study to the extent that the audio recordings demonstrate a wide variety of temporal & spatial rain event complexity. This suggests that environmental sonification has great potential to measure rainfall accurately, & address recognized shortcomings of existing equipment & approaches in meteorology.
Rain-induced sounds with long wire instruments have a wide range of unique, audibly recognisable features. All of these sonic features exhibit dynamic volume & tonal characteristics, depending on the rain type & environmental conditions. These unique sound properties can take many forms such as high to low frequency crackles & swept zaps, similar to sounds produced by a sound synthesizer. Aside from the vast array of creative possibilities, the high spatial, temporal, volume & tonal resolution could provide significant advancement to knowledge of rainfall event profiles, intensity & microstructure.
Rainwire is beyond simple sonification of data. It embeds technology & data collection within cultural contexts. With rainfall as the catalyst to draw inspiration from Indigenous, natural, & artificial complex systems, artists & cultural groups are the key to informing science & inciting new creative modalities. At the culmination of the project it is envisaged the prototype technology will be ready for adaptation to a range of cultural contexts, such as developing nations, their water management, agriculture, and weather/ecosystem monitoring industries.
