Living Data
Visualisations
INDEX
Climate science confirms our sense of being a part of a complex living world.
Because we process information in different ways
different forms are needed to visualise connectivity.
INDEX OF VISUALISATIONS UNDER CONSTRUCTION
ANIMATING CHANGE
Living Data: Animating change
This iteration of Oceanic Living Data combines the animation presented at the 2012 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting with music by VOA (Benn DeMole & Catriona Davies). Original music was composed by VOA for Oceanic Sydneyand performed with dancers Caterina Mocciola & Ashley Macqueen. The title reflects the thought that we can affect change in our environment according to how we relate to it. The animation visualises relationships that exist between us and other living things. The music embodies sensory responses of two musicians to the animation, and the sensory knowledge of krill expressed by scientist Steve Nicolin answer to the question, How do krill sound? Steve suggested that "krill swarms must sound like billions of small mandibles breaking small pieces of glass - diatom shellls are made up of silica". (In Email conversation with Lisa Roberts, Tue, 18 Sep 2012)
We know that
Circling, Spiralling, Crossing lines...
describe natural systems...
physical, biological, emotional.
Glacial ice melts.
Krill stir the sea.
Diatoms drift.
Connectivity is felt and measured.
Antarctic sea ice pulses...
like breath.
Water energy flows.
Water molecules freeze and thaw.
The circumpolar current spins.
Cold bottom water spirals from Antarctica.
Nutrients are drawn up...
by krill and ocean currents.
Krill release eggs.
Sea levels rise.
Oceans warm.
More CO2 seeps into the water...
than many creatures can bear.
CO2 acidifies water.
Natural balance between plants and animals...
is tipping.
Human hands create...
to suit human desires.
Plants of the land and sea create...
the oxygen we breathe...
Is the problem human?
Anthroposcene?
Can the solution be human?
Can life as we know it adapt...
to increasing variability in temperature?
Lisa Roberts, Sue Anderson, Steve Nicol 2012
IMAGINE CHANGE
If you think about how marine life is responding to climate change, it's a bit like people living on islands that are slowly being inundated by sea level rise. The change isn't perceptible at first, but then when the tide reaches your front door, you realise there's a problem.
And just as there are complexities for environmental refugees who have to leave their homes and live elsewhere, many marine species have limited options for dealing with climate change. They can migrate or retreat just like islanders, or adapt to their new environmental conditions.
Some species have very limited dispersal capabilities and will therefore be forced to retreat or adapt. Imagine having to rebuild your house and change the way you live, just so that you can stay in the area you want to live...
Martina Doblin 2011
Watch video and download some of the data and science behind the story
In The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2010, pp.30-31) Iain McGilchristdescribes how we 'attend' to the world by holding 'pre-reflective...in-betweenness' ways of being that allow us to model it so we can move forward:
Experience is forever in motion, ramifying and unpredictable. In order for us to know anything at all, that thing must have enduring properties. If all things flow, and one can never step into the same river twice - Heraclitus's phrase is, I believe, a brilliant evocation of the core reality of the right hemisphere's world - one will always be taken unawares by experience, since nothing being ever repeated, nothing can ever be known. We have to find a way of fixing it as it flies, stepping back from the immediacy of experience, stepping outside the flow... [in order to create] a 're-presented' version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predications can be based.
Artists add unespected depths of meaning to recommendationsmade by social scientists, to:
Provide understandable, scientific, credible information
Exhibit novel, vivid and concrete imagery
Connect with emotions to inspire care and motivate action
Offer experiential learning through interactive presentations
Balance negative and positive information
