M.A.R.I.N. camp forum

The huge amount of spiders around the art colony inspired me to work on this three spiderweb structures. Because the spiders immediately populate the artificial web, the structure of the network changes continuosly and introduces a different point of view to those omnipresent creatures and engages a coexistence between insects and art.

on site at
nida art colony, Curonian Spit, Lithuania

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populated spidernetworks

During the 1 month residency I took around 400 different photos. Out of this pool emerges an hand drawn emotional and subjective map of the three different locations in Norway, Sweden and Lithuania.

at
nida art colony, Curonian Spit, Lithuania

Here we were encouraged to show our works in progress during the open studio event on the 27.8.2011 and the cartography of everyday at sea, as it´s a very long drawing was used as a link between the main community space in the ground floor and the more private first floor area where M.A.R.I.N. residents presented the artpieces.

Details

Atmers are kinetic inflatable objects which try to reflect on the surrounding environment and its health state through repetitive movements which resemble breathing.

at
kultivator, art and agriculture, Öland, Sweden

As we were at a farm, the first step was to create a working space. What would be a better place for some artistic-scientific research than a kitchen ? Fortunately Kultivator has a so called Outdoor-Kitchen, which was not in permanent use, so this approved to be the perfect place to feel the environment and to create art. When the weather was bad, or it was to cold, we changed to a not yet finished residency space, where a bed had to take the function of a table.

In a future version of the project, the health state of the inflatable objects will be triggered by sensoric input. In this case I used myself as a sensor, trying to feel the environement and transfer this emotions in the breathing algorithms.

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at
nida art colony , Curonian Spit, Lithuania

Here we were encouraged to show our works in progress during the open studio event on the 27.8.2011 as this was generally an indoor event I placed the Atmers next to one of our sleeping rooms which we converted into studiospaces.

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Flørli, Lysefjord, Norway

together with Tapio Mäkelä

Already before we arrived to Flörli, there where rumors about the so called “Stairway to heaven”, 4444 wooden stairs, which belong to the old Powerplant.

We had the idea to create some device, which has a camera mounted on it to ride those tracks, next to the wooden stairs, down.

When we climbed those stairs up, which took about two to three hours we were far to exhausted to modify the not really working first prototype, so we came back without success. But after some days the motivation came back and just before we left the beautiful Lysefjord Tapio and I created a second version which actually was kind of successful. Absollutly fun included.

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We’re in the midst of completing work on a first version of an Android smart phone app (built in Processing) that will detect GPS and allow users to record and playback sounds from their environment. We’re almost done work on the programming and are currently using it to create a sound walk for the art/farm kultivator, on Sweden’s idyllic island Oland.

Kultivator is a working example of the cooperation between art and agriculture. It is a farm and an art centre with many stories to tell and lots of perspective on the overlapping issues of environment, food production and consumption, the intersection of nature and culture, and human responsibility to the land.

We decided to interview the main players here - Malin Lindmark Vrijman, Mathieu Vrijman, Henric Stigeborn, and Mia Lindmark - and ask them to tell us about how the farm began, their interest in developing the connection between art and agriculture, and any relevant and important stories about the place.

They took us on little walks around the farm and pointed out significant places, which we logged as GPS points for the app.  When we move on to Lithuania the end of this week, we plan to leave behind a walking tour for use by visitors to the farm.

More details about the app development itself will follow soon …

Oland has a rich landscape full of wild fruit. Hazelnut, Sloeberry and its cousin the wild Plum are spread all over the surroundings of Kultivator on the East Coast of the island. During the M.A.R.I.N. workshop a database of these wild apples and pears is made.

The data collected includes: location (GPS coordinates mapped on Boskoi), the amount of fruits on the tree (roughly) and a photograph of the location. The collected fruit samples are described in taste, size, outer shape, core shape, and length of  the stalk. Also each apple gets its portrait taken.

More about the project in this interview for local radio station DITT P4 Kalmar

Two excerpts of the show presented by Erika Norberg:

Lyssna: Därför kartlägger Theun vildäpplen...

Lyssna: "Det godaste vildäpplet hittade jag i Åkerby..."

Very large mushrooms

Last week, a few of us took some hours to wander around the land near Kultivator and look for good things to eat.  We were mostly hunting for mushrooms, and while at the end of the day we were lead to some very sizeable specimens, we also came back with an armload of late asparagus, some wild marjoram, and a batch of young hazelnuts.  These were all cooked-up and we shared the food with our fellow residents, as a late-evening dinner, complete with three courses.

Through food gathering / production and consumption, we reaffirm again and again our connection to the land.  Place, landscape, ecology, and cultivation are all implicated as we establish a relationship to the edible possibilities afforded by a particular locality.  In the case of farming, this includes traditional cultivation techniques and strategies, which of course are always mitigated by culture.

Our stay at Kultivator is a real education in the processes of organic farming. Our hosts are constantly working to create a local, healthy, and humane approach to dairy (and other) production.  For example, the cows here are fed almost exclusively with feed (grass and hay), which can be cultivated year-round on the farm.

Of course, foraging for wild foods implicates an entirely different set of systems. Foraging is a simple and direct way to connect to those natural systems in which we are embedded.  Going out to search for food reminded me of the wild and seemingly unpredictable processes of propagation and growth occurring among a myriad of plant and animal species, all the time.  It was a way of connecting to these systems in a sensory way, as we wandered and sampled wild berries, nuts, and the like.

Our search through the forested paths and brush yielded several edibles, however, some were a surprise.  It was an unpredictable journey and we were quite happy with the results. However, we had to be flexible with our responses to what we found … and come up with an innovative menu plan. In the context of M.A.R.I.N., this was a valuable and tasty exercise in our human connection to ecological systems. Also, most simply, it was a great way for the group to gather and share a meal.

During our stay in Stavanger with iolab, we were luck enough to visit IRIS (International Research Institute Stavanger), a marine-centered research institute working in environmental sensing, data collection, and applied research. We were received by Jan-Borsth, the research director, and were given an extensive tour, as well as a chance to participate in a roundtable discussion where we explored the possibilities of artistic investigation to sit alongside scientific research.

The largest takeaway for me was the idea of ‘sense-making’ – i.e. techniques for artists to present data in different ways – such as sonification – that would allow for the ‘viewer’ to experience more immediate impressions, diverse readings, and/or allow for different faculties and intelligences to be engaged when taking in scientific datasets.

Tapio mentioned a previous prototype from a previous Marin residency where environmental conditions were monitored on a small island in Finland, and the Arduino controller directly controlled various flag positions that would arrange themselves depending upon the data collected, allowing a longer range visual recognition of the data (and not requiring the user to even embark onto the island itself). Niki’s current project is another example of this, where his ‘auqalung‘ , if I can use that phrase, will organize it’s breath according to realtime Ph-balance readings of the water environment where it sits.

Coming from my paradigm and experience, I thought of a more extreme, aestheticized example; the Marin team could collaborate with IRIS and iolab to produce a concert event, where the IRIS personnel would be responsible for installing a mussel tank where each specimen would be monitored for how often they open and close their shell (apparently an indicator of stress, based upon the water quality), and we could be fed the data stream in realtime. The data could then be used to control a software patch, perhaps in Pure Data, where the opening and closing of the shells could individually control the playback of audio samples. Over the course of the event, the IRIS staff could slowly induce the tank environment with ‘pollutants’ that would effect the water quality and thus increase stress in the mussels, prompting them to change the pace of their activity. A separate sensor could feed us the level of pollutants, which could be used to effect realtime filtering and effects, or to shift through different sample sets in Pure Data.

The resulting event could produce a scientifically-relevant experience where the audience has the chance to use several senses – visual, auditory, and cognitive – to make a clear connection between environmental factors and the health of our natural world, allowing for a vastly different experience of science to emerge. Just a thought…

Caught on 6.6.11

DIY tool for measuring and communicating radiation in fish.

I had been thinking very hard about the scientific process of collecting samples for radiation measuring. I broke down the areas concerned and tried to figure out the relationships between them – the science – the samples – the public. Who are these elements I wondered, what is their character?

I found myself thinking as scientist, interpreter and citizen. I incorporated all roles in the process of figuring out how to respond to this very small activity in the hugely important and massive activity of radiation as a phenomenon overall: what of the radiation in fish in the Baltic Sea?

And so, as citizen first, I decided to become a scientist and engage in the process, however flawed my attempt, and would then try and communicate my findings, however flawed the effort. So I built my own measuring station where fish are lured into an escapable cage, measured for radiation, and the radiation is stored in a publicly accessible data transmission house above water. The last idea is an attempt to create a ‘seamark’ or ‘beacon’ that communicates both the data, and the act of collecting data.