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Information Comes from the Sun – Julian Priest

 

Information Comes from the Sun 2011, Julian Priest, Solar powered monitor, Video animation, Media player, Photovoltaic cells

 

Open System Closed 2011, Julian Priest, Assemblage (nine underwater camera cases, found objects)

Discussion

“Information comes from The Sun” is a video artwork consisting of an animation of The Sun that was first shown at ISEA 2011 in Istanbul Turkey.

The animation is made from Solar Observatory data images of the sun that have been rendered in zero’s and ones using ascii art software and a custom font.

The animation shows a single solar rotation (28 days) photographed twice a day by the SOHO orbital instrument EIT304.

The animation may be connected to a one pixel camera that measures light levels and adjusts the resolution of the animation accordingly.

In the dark a single zero is shown – as light levels increase the number of characters increases until in the brightest light a full image of the sun is shown with every pixel a character.

Information comes from the sun represents the sun as an information source rather than an energy source – an information service provider.

What is it that we get from the Sun that we use up on Earth to power life?

Most people would say energy.

While The Earth is bathed in an enormous flow of energy from The Sun, it is not the energy that we use up on Earth. Energy from The Sun falls on Earth as visible light yet if we look at The Earth from space as an energy emitter, we see that it radiates energy as infrared light. In fact the incoming visible light energy and the infrared outgoing energy are more or less equal. If they were not in equilibrium The Earth would quickly explode. As a whole The Earth maintains an energy balance and therefore in cannot be the ENERGY from The Sun that we use up.

If we look at the incoming and outgoing energy streams we can however see that there is a frequency drop. This is related to a quantity called entropy which is a measure of disorder or energy disspipation. Entropy can also be thought of as the opposite of information. A system with higher entropy has less information. The information we are talking about here is not digital information 1’s and 0’s but possible physical states.

The entropy of the outgoing energy from the earth is greater – there is less information in the global output stream, than in the input.

This entropy gradient is what we use to structure life on earth – all the biology, culture and technology that we see on earth is a result of the process of converting the more ordered energy stream from the sun, into a more disordered output stream. We take a high information source, convert it into a low information source, and the difference stays with us on earth – as biosphere, civilisation, culture and technology.

If we think about it in this way it is clear that it really is information that comes from the sun – it is carried by a massive energy flow, but what the earth uses from the sun is the potential to order – to create structure or information.

In the field of non-linear thermodynamics it is shown that it is precisely the fact that life is efficient at degrading the entropic gradient that makes it possible to exist as a meta stable state at all.

When we reframe our understanding of the relationship between us and the sun as an informatic one rather than an energetic one there are some consequences. If we understand that the life process is not about energy, but about transforming energy in a
way that maximises information capture, we may choose to do things differently.

Currently we foreground access to energy resources politically with much emphasis placed on securing access to fossil fuels. This is a kind of quantative view of the world as resource. If however we focus on the informatic, we look not at how much energy we can capture, but how much structure we can produce for a given amount of low entropy energy or information.

Looked at this way a tree is worth more alive than dead, as an ecosystem rather than firewood. As a complex living structure of information it is vastly richer informationally than an information poor ash pile. With informational eyes we foreground efficiency over power.

With this artwork I’d like to begin to propose a different language for re-framing what are currently energetic issues as informatic ones. With this as a starting point we will have more luck in designing a sustainable infrastructure as we slowly but surely out of the fossil fuel era.

Julian Priest
05.11.2011

 

 

Whanaunga – Lisa Reihana

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whanaunga 2011, Lisa Reihana (artist) and James Pinker (sound), Digital Video

Photo Astronomy images – Paul Moss


Photo Astronomy images, 2011, Paul Moss, Photograph and vinyl print

Oceans of Air

From the Bottom of an Ocean of Air – Tega Brain, Kirsty Boyle, Ramon Guardans

From the Bottom of an Ocean of Air, 2011 from Tega Brain on Vimeo.

Artist and scientist Ramon Guardans traces pollutants and their effect on local and global populations, health and environments and examines the relevance of different ways of life in understanding exposure. He has been involved for 20 years in international action on atmospheric and marine pollution including the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP). Ramon was joined by roboticist Kirsty Boyle and environmental engineer and media artist Tega Brain in conducting experiments within the atmospheric environments of New Plymouth, Taranaki during the SCANZ 2011: Eco sapiens creative residency.

The intrepid team is currently undergoing further investigations in Noosa on Australia’s Sunshine coast, as part of the Floating Land event.

Remnant Breath – Keith Armstrong and Leah Barclay

Leah Barclay (AU) and Keith Armstrong (AU) (as part of Remnant/Emergency Artlab/SCANZ 2011: Eco sapiens) invite you to an immersive sound walk on the Te Henui Walkway this Wednesday 26th January.

The work invites an acute sensitisation to this place solely through the often ignored senses of sound. The 20 minute experience reveals remnant sonic layers of this environment and explores stories of water, breath, place and environmental action.

‘Remnant Breath’ is the first showing of a work in progress. The project will evolve into an interactive garden of ephemeral sound growing and conversing with the natural environment.

Walks start at either 9pm or 10pm and last around 20 minutes  – please arrive on time as it will not be possible to join the walk late.

Enter the Te Henui Walkway from the Lemon Street Entrance (close to Watson Street)  – right next to the entrance to the Te Henui Graveyard on Lemon Street.

Presented as part of the SCANZ 2011: Eco sapiens events which have brought over 20 local national and international artists to Taranaki.

MAPS

View Remnant Breath in a larger map

Incompatible Elements – Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski

downstream installation: Australian Embassy Gallery, Washington DC, USA, September, 2009

The failure of nations to reach an agreement at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last year has highlighted a huge gap between scientific consensus and public perceptions of climate change.

Downstream is a media art installation, which explores ways of representing the relationship between nature and culture. Employing poetic texts embedded into animated satellite images of landscapes at particular risk, it responds to the effects of climate change in ways that are mythical, biblical and chemical.

The work involves large screen installations which combine satellite imagery with local imagery and views of river systems threatened by global warming.
Downstream documentation

Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs are Australian artists whose video and new media works have been shown extensively in Australia and internationally. They have created numerous projects including Seeker an installation that explores issues of migration, territorial boundaries, conflict commodities and human displacement. Seeker won an Award of Distinction in Interactive Art from the 2007 Prix Ars Electronica, Austria. Other work includes a.k.a. a video about universal surveillance, the Trace interactive installation, Bio-Tek Kitchen a computer game patch, Dream Kitchen an interactive stop-motion animation and Floating Territories a game art installation. They have been invited to participate in several international residency programs including Banff, Canada 1998, Sarai, New Delhi, India, 2006 and the Future Lab, Linz, Austria, 2009.

http://lx.sysx.org

Ecotones – Janine Randerson

Ecotones (Image of installation detail of Cascade)

The bar-tailed godwit, the longest non-stop migrator of any species, is dependent on a global network of estuaries or ‘ecotones’, where terrestrial and marine ecosystems meet. These environments are under pressure due to being seen as transitional, unwanted, hybrid spaces. Janine’s project employs information from satellite telemetry and sonification to create a visual and acoustic reconception of the journey of these migratory birds. In this way the installation works to undermine the atomisation of North/South, human/non-human, air, sea and earthly relations.

http://www.janineranderson.com/