Curatorial statement for Te Kore Rongo Hungaora – Second Nature

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Curated by Ian Clothier with an advisory panel of Nina Czegledy, Tengaruru Wineera and Trudy Lane, a bridge between Maori and European cultures of Aotearoa New Zealand has been constructed. The cultural bridge interconnects both Maori and European knowledge at the level of summary. Five themes from within European and Maori world views were located.

Given the intercultural bridge, works from art and science are recontextualised as cultural texts symbolic of belief systems. Discipline is not viewed as fixed, but fluid in a transformational environment. In the exhibition, digital and post-digital exist in a state of hybridity.

The project began with the selection of concepts shared across ideological borders. The topics were loosely connected and include cosmological context, all is energy, life emerged from water, anthropic principle and integrated systems. All the selected works address more than one of these thematic regions.

Discipline boundaries were breached, following a course charted at SCANZ 2011: Eco sapiens where artists, scientists, environmentalists, activists, educationalists, philosophers and tangata whenua came together to collectively re-imagine our narratives on nature. In this way the event sought to encourage cultural shifts in response to the environmental crisis facing earth and humanity.

Breaching boundaries of culture and discipline, generating cultural hybridity and interdisciplinarity has consequences. There are gains and losses in the approach, but what might be won is a way forward that is sustainable, affirmative and interconnected. One sense of the term ‘culture’ refers to customary practice or a way of thinking, while one sense of ‘discipline’ is method – in these senses of those words, the works here arise from a culture of sharing and a discipline of openness.

 

Curator – Ian Clothier CV and bio

Ian Clothier is Director of Intercreate Research Centre (intercreate.org) and Founder and Co-director of SCANZ residency, symposium and exhibition. As an artist his projects intersect art, technology, science and culture. Recent creative projects include the integrated systems The Park Speaks and Haiku robots; and the hybrid cultural Making History a project of his internet micronation The District of Leistavia. He has had thirteen solo shows and been selected for exhibition at institutions in twelve countries including three ISEA exhibitions: ISEA 2009 Belfast exhibition; Taranaki culture at Puke Ariki, New Zealand; ISEA 2008 Singapore symposium; net.NET at The JavaMuseum; for Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in the USA (upstate New York); ISEA 2006 San Jose exhibition; Graphite at the University of Otago NZ; the First International Festival of Electronic Art in Rio de Janeiro; Fair Assembly at ZKM; New Forms Festival in Vancouver; ISEA 2004 Tallinn/Helsinki exhibition; ReJoyce in Dublin and Wild 2002 in the Tasmanian Museum.  He was awarded a Converge Artist Fellowship at the University of Canterbury in 2005 for an augmented reality project. Written work has been published in respected journals, Leonardo, Convergence and Digital Creativity and he has delivered papers to conferences and symposia worldwide.

Curatorial experience includes being selection panel member for Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand 2006; SCANZ 2009: Raranga Tangata; SCANZ 2011: Eco sapiens; Inter:place at Puke Ariki 2010; WITT-wide an exhibition covering work by staff of all departments of Taranaki’s polytechnic in 2009; Interactive City selection panel for ISEA 2006; Exhibitions, Policy and Education Officer, The Gallery Akaroa 1990 – 1992; Co-director of Summer Entertainment in Akaroa 1986; and Exhibition Officer 1984-86 at the Gallery Akaroa.

As well as curatorial panel membership he also produced and creatively directed the SCANZ events with Trudy Lane. Previously he had been Special Projects Manager at the University of Auckland Business School (managing world class teaching technology installations 1997-2002), and Survey Manager for Halcrow Fox Associates in the UK 1988-1990). In 2002 he was awarded and MA (Hons) from AUT, and has a Diploma of Art in Visual Arts from Monash University Gippsland Campus.

Research Publications

Clothier, I (2009). The Collaborative Landscape: some insights into current practice in the visual arts ITPQ refereed conference proceedings.

Clothier, I (2008). Leonardo, nonlinearity and integrated systems in Leonardo Volume 41 Number 1 pp. 49-55.

Clothier, I. & Lane, T. (2008). Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand in S. Brennan & S. Ballard (Eds.) The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader. Auckland: Clouds.

Clothier, I. & Lane, T. (2008). SCANZ. New Plymouth: Intercreate Press. ISBN 978-0-473-13388-7.

Clothier, I. (2007). Formen der Reprasentation: Hybride Kulturen, Nonlinearitat und creative Verfahren (Forms of Representation: Hybrid Culture, Nonlinearity and Creative Practice). In Kroncke, M; Mey, K & Spielmann, Y. (Eds.) Kultureller Umbau: Räume, Identitäten, Re/Präsentationen (Cultural Reconstruction: Spaces, Identities, Re/Presentations). Bielefeld: Transcript. ISBN 978-3-89942-556-7.

Clothier, I (2007). Created identities: hybrid cultures and the internet (revised with images) at http://www.hz-journal.org/n11/clothier.html

Clothier, I. (2007). Art.data/branching. New Plymouth: Intercreate Press. ISBN 978-0-473-11915-7.

Clothier, I. (2005). Created identities: hybrid cultures and the internet in Convergence  Volume 11 Number 4 p 44-59; London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi:Sage Publications

Clothier, I. (2003). Hybrid cultures: what, where and how about us? Nga Waka, Aotearoa NZ Association of Art Educators Conference published in Nga Waka, ANZAAE refereed conference proceedings, Vol. One (1),2003

Clothier, I. (2001). From chaos and cosmology: a new space for the visual arts in Digital Creativity Volume 12 no. 1, p 31-44.

Curatorial statement for Te Kore Rongo Hungaora – Second Nature

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Curated by Ian Clothier with an advisory panel of Nina Czegledy, Tengaruru Wineera and Trudy Lane, a bridge between Maori and European cultures of Aotearoa New Zealand has been constructed. The project began with the selection of concepts shared across ideological borders. The topics were loosely connected and include cosmological context, all is energy, life emerged from water, anthropic principle and integrated systems. All the selected works address more than one of these thematic regions.

Discipline boundaries have also been breached, following a course charted at SCANZ 2011: Eco sapiens where artists, scientists, environmentalists, activists, educationalists, philosophers and tangata whenua came together to collectively re-imagine our narratives on nature. In this way the event sought to encourage cultural shifts in response to the environmental crisis facing earth and humanity.

Breaching boundaries of culture and discipline, generating cultural hybridity and interdisciplinarity has consequences. There are gains and losses in the approach, but what might be won is a way forward that is sustainable, affirmative and interconnected. One sense of the term ‘culture’ refers to customary practice or a way of thinking, while one sense of ‘discipline’ is method – in these senses of those words, the works here arise from a culture of sharing and a discipline of openness.

 

Curator – Ian Clothier CV and bio

Ian Clothier is Director of Intercreate Research Centre (intercreate.org) and Founder and Co-director of SCANZ residency, symposium and exhibition. As an artist his projects intersect art, technology, science and culture. Recent creative projects include the integrated systems The Park Speaks and Haiku robots; and the hybrid cultural Making History a project of his internet micronation The District of Leistavia. He has had thirteen solo shows and been selected for exhibition at institutions in twelve countries including three ISEA exhibitions: ISEA 2009 Belfast exhibition; Taranaki culture at Puke Ariki, New Zealand; ISEA 2008 Singapore symposium; net.NET at The JavaMuseum; for Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in the USA (upstate New York); ISEA 2006 San Jose exhibition; Graphite at the University of Otago NZ; the First International Festival of Electronic Art in Rio de Janeiro; Fair Assembly at ZKM; New Forms Festival in Vancouver; ISEA 2004 Tallinn/Helsinki exhibition; ReJoyce in Dublin and Wild 2002 in the Tasmanian Museum. He was awarded a Converge Artist Fellowship at the University of Canterbury in 2005 for an augmented reality project. Written work has been published in respected journals, Leonardo, Convergence and Digital Creativity and he has delivered papers to conferences and symposia worldwide.

Curatorial experience includes being selection panel member for Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand 2006; SCANZ 2009: Raranga Tangata; SCANZ 2011: Eco sapiens; Inter:place at Puke Ariki 2010; WITT-wide an exhibition covering work by staff of all departments of Taranaki’s polytechnic in 2009; Interactive City selection panel for ISEA 2006; Exhibitions, Policy and Education Officer, The Gallery Akaroa 1990 – 1992; Co-director of Summer Entertainment in Akaroa 1986; and Exhibition Officer 1984-86 at the Gallery Akaroa.

As well as curatorial panel membership he also produced and creatively directed the SCANZ events with Trudy Lane. Previously he had been Special Projects Manager at the University of Auckland Business School (managing world class teaching technology installations 1997-2002), and Survey Manager for Halcrow Fox Associates in the UK 1988-1990). In 2002 he was awarded and MA (Hons) from AUT, and has a Diploma of Art in Visual Arts from Monash University Gippsland Campus.

Research Publications

Clothier, I (2009). The Collaborative Landscape: some insights into current practice in the visual arts ITPQ refereed conference proceedings.

Clothier, I (2008). Leonardo, nonlinearity and integrated systems in Leonardo Volume 41 Number 1 pp. 49-55.

Clothier, I. & Lane, T. (2008). Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand in S. Brennan & S. Ballard (Eds.) The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader. Auckland: Clouds.

Clothier, I. & Lane, T. (2008). SCANZ. New Plymouth: Intercreate Press. ISBN 978-0-473-13388-7.

Clothier, I. (2007). Formen der Reprasentation: Hybride Kulturen, Nonlinearitat und creative Verfahren (Forms of Representation: Hybrid Culture, Nonlinearity and Creative Practice). In Kroncke, M; Mey, K & Spielmann, Y. (Eds.) Kultureller Umbau: Räume, Identitäten, Re/Präsentationen (Cultural Reconstruction: Spaces, Identities, Re/Presentations). Bielefeld: Transcript. ISBN 978-3-89942-556-7.

Clothier, I (2007). Created identities: hybrid cultures and the internet (revised with images) at http://www.hz-journal.org/n11/clothier.html

Clothier, I. (2007). Art.data/branching. New Plymouth: Intercreate Press. ISBN 978-0-473-11915-7.

Clothier, I. (2005). Created identities: hybrid cultures and the internet in Convergence Volume 11 Number 4 p 44-59; London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi:Sage Publications

Clothier, I. (2003). Hybrid cultures: what, where and how about us? Nga Waka, Aotearoa NZ Association of Art Educators Conference published in Nga Waka, ANZAAE refereed conference proceedings, Vol. One (1),2003

Clothier, I. (2001). From chaos and cosmology: a new space for the visual arts in Digital Creativity Volume 12 no. 1, p 31-44.

Oceans of Air

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

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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.

Where was the Wind? – Ramon Guardans

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Where was the Wind? Installation view.

During the SCANZ 2011: Eco sapiens creative residency, Artist and Scientist Ramon Guardans took an air sample at the same time each day of the two week residency, sealing and placing it within a growing installation for the project.

These captured air samples were traced in time using the NOAA HYSPLIT model to reveal their surprisingly variable and global recent travels. An indicator of the great oceans of air that we live beneath – and the tiny viewing window we have on these vast and ever-changing forces – what we call weather. The visualisation of these phenomena which know no national boundaries, speaks to an essentially inescapable condition of interconnectedness between the biospheres of the earth and between ourselves. It equally brings to mind the folly of expecting that the impacts of global conditions such as climate change can be successfully mitigated via nationalistic or even continental mechanisms.

In Ramon’s own words, he asks:

Where was the air we breath now yesterday and the day before… ?

Air masses move over long distances in the atmosphere, and change their properties (temperature, humidity, pollutant load etc) along the way.

A given air mass can be followed over several days as it travels and mixes with other air masses.

Using the global meteorological information obtained from weather stations and satellites it is possible to calculate the “backward trajectory” of an air mass, and see where the air we breathe today was some hours, or days ago.

In a sense what we are doing here is “playing the film backwards” and seeing where the recent story of the air in our lungs started some days ago.

A map is calculated and drawn for each day and paired with an air sample for that day.

The calculations are made using the HYSPLIT model from NOAA (The US weather service) each small triangle on the trajectory represents a 6 hour interval and the larger triangles represent 24 hour intervals, the distance between the marks indicates the speed at which the air mass travels.

 

How-to – Tracing Wind Trajectories

1. Find the GPS coordinates for your location.
(http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html)

2. Run the NOAA HYSPLIT trajectory model
(http://ready.arl.noaa.gov/hysplit-bin/trajtype.pl?runtype=archive)
Use default settings…

3. Next: Location
Location: Enter Latitude and Longitude

4. Model Run Details Page
Trajectory direction: backward
Start a new trajectory every: [increasing this will increase the number of lines showing]

 

 

Ramon Guardans – 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).

 

Remnant Breath – Keith Armstrong and Leah Barclay

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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

Plume update: ‘PLUME: 4000 Varieties of Orange’ Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris

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Emerging from PLUME, Raewyn Turner and  Richard Newcomb, is a work in progress 4000 Varieties of Orange by Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris. This new work  explores the idea that humans living in cultures have a distinct smell–which indicates that the smell of the food we eat, the flavour and fragrances may flow into the human plume. Food is fragranced and flavoured with an increasing diversity of synthetic flavours and fragrances  These are creating new sensations and associations, feelings and perceptions of taste and smell, which may be included in the human plume.

A little about the current focus of PLUME :  We’re interested in…

Subliminal odours and unconscious sensing

Hedonics: relating to or considered in terms of pleasant or unpleasant sensations

Valence: referring to the emotional value associated with a stimulus

-A very important part of that would be in finding out what it is in the human plume that human receptors can detect or not

Prior to this, in 2010 The Sensory Lab at Plant and Food Research   guided Raewyn in sensing and creating standards used to determine fragrance/ flavour thresholds –that is the limits at which flavours and fragrances  are perceived. This was for Internettraces: The Internet as a Winetasting 2009.

Internettraces : Raewyn Turner &  Mary Griffiths

4000 Varieties of Orange is in collaboration with Brian Harris who works in robotics and engineering, explores secondary (the smell of place, food we eat)  + tertiary (playground of perfumes and deodorants), human smell.

We’ve  designed a food tasting event to be held New Plymouth at Eco Sapiens and its theme will have a focus on food monocultures and fragrance/flavour biodiversity.

Our intention is to create delicious foods using a limited palette of four staple foods and a large palette of food flavourings.

At SCANZ Ecosapiens headquarters we set up a kitchen and have begun to create  flavoured pies.

We’ll make pies from the  4 staple foods and flavour them with nature-identical flavours.

Formula Foods is generously providing flavours for the project.( Thanks Formula Foods!)  Formula Foods

The recipes and flavours will be drawn from the recipes from Mrs Beeton’s Everyday Cookery and Housekeeping book ( around  the  turn of last century).

An example from Mrs Beeton’s book : November : ‘Things in Season’

Fish: brill, cod, crabs, eels, haddocks, oysters, pike, soles, turbot, whiting

Meat: Beef, mutton, veal, doe venison

Poultry: Chickens, fowl, geese, lark, pidgeons, pullets, rabbits, teal, turkeys, widgeon, wild duck

Game: Hares, partridges, pheasants, snipe, woodcock

Vegetables: Beetroot, cabbages, lettuces, late cucumbers, onions, potatoes, salading, spinach, sprouts-various herbs,

Fruit: Apples, bullaces, chestnuts, filberts, grapes, pears, walnuts

We researched historic food ingredients and presentation, focusing on the creation of hand raised pies and sprung metal pie moulds.. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pies were made in very elaborate shapes. Ivan Day’s Historic Food.

Months before EcoSapiens we started experimenting in Auckland. We wanted to get the flavouring to work and develop pastry recipes to create pie sculpture

eg

Hot water pastry for hand – raised pies:

4 cups flour

1 cup suet or shreddo

hot water to mix

pinch salt

Below: Our first pie creation in celadon green with gold leaf detail,  was filled with shaped tofu pieces fired with organic red onions and garlic. The filling was flavoured with drops of beef, chicken and bacon flavourings. The lid was hand modelled.

We found a wild apple tree on

the side of the road between

Waitaanga and Ohura.

It was laden with fruit which

provided us with apples for

our first pie experiments.

Flavouring the pies was a challenge due to the complexities of combining texture, fragrance, flavour and visual attraction.  We sought advice from award-winning chefs on recipes to create tasty pie fillings which we then adapted for the project( using soy instead of meat.)


An example of one of the pies was where we’d used chicken, beef and bacon flavourings to substitute for bird flesh. The filling was mock chicken—a type of soy protein.

When the pie was opened we noticed a definite shift from the visual pleasure of the pie to olfcto/gustatory displeasure.

We decided to utilize readily available food that would give a more pleasant taste experience – the sort of food that is readymade and available in supermarkets and already had a positive hedonic value, eg sponge cake made with wheat flour.

Our tastes are changing and adapting due to a vast diversity in fragrances and flavours being added to food. New associations are being made. Similarly our sense of colour is changing as we become accustomed to the concept of ‘millions of colours’, and the colour spectrum of coloured light—red, blue and green, on computer screens.

4000 Varieties of Orange ( in progress): Each piece of cake is individually flavoured.

We’ve started tasting authentic  flavours alongside synthetic flavourings.  We found that the synthetic flavourings are more real than the real flavour—they’re molecular constructions that convey the IDEA of flavour, thereby creating illusions.

The table centrepiece :A further experiment in progress is an ‘apparatus’ intended as an interactive flavour dispensing  table display stand–photos coming soon.

‘Nothing is allowed an odour of its own, even food

The deodorising of things…to smell like ‘ nothing’

…smells of the denial of imagination’

( Bamford, Christopher, Green Hermeticism 2007

 

Areosphere and Atmosphere – Nina Czegledy and Janine Randerson

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See images here of the final screening night »

In the era of increased scientific debate about the terraforming of Mars (a process of chemical warming of the frozen Martian climate) in order to sustain a future human population, the Areosphere and Atmosphere project enacts a sensorial connection between Earth and Mars. Materially, the project draws on the historical naming of the two planets’ polar regions by earthly colonists, science fiction imaginings and satellite mapping. As we contend with an anthropogenic climate crisis in our own bio-system, the work ruminates such ‘Big Science’ proposals as the deliberate staging of artificially produced climates in other parts of the solar system. The project will be projected on the dome of the New Plymouth Observatory on Tuesday 25 January 8.30-11pm.

Nina Czegledy, an independent media artist, curator and writer, has collaborated on international projects, produced time based and digital works and has led and participated in workshops, forums and festivals worldwide. Electromagnetic Bodies, Digitized Bodies Virtual Spectacles and the Aurora projects reflect her art, science and technology interest. These projects focus on the changing perception of the human body and are presented via on-line and on-site events in Canada and internationally. On behalf of the Leonardo SpaceArt Network Czegledy recently coordinated a space art workshop in conjunction with the Impact of Space on Society IAA Conference – in March 2005, Budapest.

Nina Czegledy Biography

Janine Randerson – New Zealand-based new media artist Janine Randerson explores the interface between the bio-system, meteorology and technology. In 2008, she was in Denmark for an art residency studying radio and satellite- tracking data of Arctic bird and mammal species at DMU (The Danish Environmental Research Institute). She has recently completed a currently a doctorate at the University of Melbourne. Janine works with a range of time-based media including 16mm film, digital audio and video and computer programmed interaction design. Her art practice includes both site-specific work and single channel video.

Janine Randerson projects and information