#15: Underwater art | Fishy tricks | 'Graphic' sound
art | science | digital culture | design | creativity | words | tech
art | science
Underwater art
I’ve just heard about a cool upcoming project, the Museum of Underwater Art. It will start to be installed later this year in a few locations along the Queensland coast in the Great Barrier Reef marine park.
This is the artist Jason deCaires Taylor’s impression of the first piece to be installed.
According to a writeup of the project in the Guardian,
The solar-powered sculpture of a young indigenous girl will change colour as a visual warning of critical warming, using live water-temperature data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science. It will be exposed at low tide and underwater at high tide.
One of the aims of the project is “to raise awareness of the threatened ecosystem”. I have to be honest that I am somewhat skeptical about the power of art in itself to change people’s minds about environmental issues. It’s hard to believe that there can be many persuadable people left on a topic such as this seeing as it has become so strongly coupled to things like socio-political tribe. It’s probably also important that this kind of work doesn’t get positioned as “art” because I suspect that will only reinforce a tribal divide.
However, we have to keep trying and if there are enough memorable provocations about the topic that people don’t write off as just another instance of people ramming an agenda down their throat, then it at least has a chance of doing something. Here in Australia, it feels like politics is currently driven by fear of the other, as long as “the other” isn’t an uninhabitable future planet.
It will be interesting to see how this project goes and what the public reception of it is like.
art | tech | design
Fish controlled gadgets
I’m not sure why I’m a sucker for fish-controlled devices but I just discovered this one. It’s a hammer that moves according to the position of a fish in a tank and it periodically smashes objects.
Even better is that the artist has made all of the designs available online. As far as I can tell, the hammer just comes down periodically as a cam turns. I’d rather see the hammer come down based on the fish’s position because the appeal of projects like this is how there is the impression of agency given to something not normally considered to be making conscious active decisions about its surroundings. (For me, this carries across to algorithms and computers appearing to have agency.) But seeing as the plans are online, perhaps I’ll just have to make a variant of the project!
A project this brings to my mind and that I find even more fun in a few ways is the fish that drives itself around. It uses a similar kind of technology and process but gets more at things I find quite intriguing.
This is the first version of it I encountered:
I’m pretty sure it’s a copy of a previous project (below) but I like that it seems to be a student project hacked together.
Recently I’ve been chatting with colleagues about various internet-controlled projects and had some students build some fun ones. So I wonder whether this could be controlled in some other ways. Could you have a web interface to mechanically drop fish food in particular positions to attract the fish and thereby drive the machine around, so the fish just becomes an intermediate step in a control mechanism? Or could you train the fish to do certain things and control that remotely? Yes, goldfish can be trained. Here’s a video of a biologist training one:
Ok, on to something more highbrow next…
art | tech | science
What is the look of sound? A recently discovered short film
László Moholy-Nagy was an artist who did pioneering work in a wide range of fields including painting, photography, sculpture, film, theatre, and writing. He taught in the Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920s where he advocated for the integration of technology with art and craft. I am most familiar with his work through his kinetic sculptures that incorporated art, science, and technology and used a range of new-at-the-time materials such as plexiglass. His work Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator) (1930) has an important place in the history of modern sculpture. Here is a clip of it (still working!)
The effect of the light being reflected from it was of greater interest to Moholy-Nagy than the mechanical structure itself, although it is a beautiful piece in itself. You can see the mechanics a little more clearly in this clip:
Given his importance to modern art, it is exciting that an archivist has just uncovered a previously unknown work of his, ABC in Sound (1933). It was found spooled with another work by animator Oskar Fischinger. (A surprisingly common place to find lost film work!)
It’s short and abstract (read “weird”) but I like it. It premiered publicly last month at a showing by the British Film Institute. You can read a lot more about the film and its context here. Here is the film: