Dancing on the Margins of Climate Change
a work in progress
Performance tonight at Karlsøyfestivalen, 19:30 Norwegian time
Remix of MITT OPPRØR MOT OPPDRITT / RAGE AGAINST THE FISH FARM MACHINE and a work in progress for my piece in OUT OF URGENCY.
THIS IS MY LAND
Watch it here:
Photo: MITT OPPRØR MOT OPPDRITT / RAGE AGAINST THE FISH FARM MACHINE at Karlsøyfestival 2019 , Photographer: Pia De Mally
Da e vi i full gang med MOVING BARENTS: OUT OF URGENCY
Det e mye klaging på måsen for tida, så hær kommer en dans til ære for måsen!
Menneskan Menneskam
The Trolls are gathering
The earth has for long been a battle field for the clashes of light and shadow, hope and dreams, despair and destruction. Every light with its shadow / every shadow from its light.
The trolls has for long been pushed to the side. Just like the other spirits of the earth the imagination of humans has pushed them to the shadows, but their shadow does not belong to the clashes of good or bad.
Today they go to dance, they go to talk with Shiva, they go to get their bodies taken by the wind.
To celebrate their lives, their beliefs, to let the weather speak. Tonight there is battle, but not theirs, for they celebrate as the God of destruction dances her dance, as the wind of destruction will blow down on earth, the trolls say they go to watch the game. they go to dance with Shiva, they go to let their bodies be taken by her dance, by her will, by her love, today they go to celebrate and to thank the wind as Nangijala and Mordor are clashing in the skies.
Susanna Voiushina & Dmitrii Melnikov (Arkhangelsk | RUS)
Many of us (especially at the time of Covid) were trying to escape from big cities
and move to the countryside.
We are willing to live closer to nature, feeling it makes us healthier and happier.
We prefer to stay in our own house with some small garden instead of city apartments.
But it turns to be a very special cultural experience when we look at this aspect
in Russia.
DACHA as a cultural code of a person.
Can you imagine Soviet nine-story building inverted from vertical to horizontal?
Basically this is the way how we see Dacha villages.
Why we decide to live so close to each other in a country that has
the largest territory in the world?
How can nature manifest itself there?
Jessica Bateman writes for the BBC about young people living in Skopje in North Macedonia, where pollution levels are so high that they all want to leave.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200701-skopje-north-macedonia-the-most-polluted-city-in-europe
It’s morning to me but the choir has started its day way earlier. Different sounds, chirps, and twitters fills the air and surroundings – it sounds like a chaotic harmony to me. I arrive to the backyard terrace with a cup of coffee and make it to get a sight when the fieldfare (räkättirastas in Finnish) flies to the nearest spruce. After a while it comes back, collecting worms and insects to its chicks.
Couple days ago I was lucky to see a bullfinch (punatulkku), my favorite bird from the childhood. I was waiting for to see it the whole last winter while feeding the birds. Now in the middle of summer time it arrives and shows its amazing red tummy. The bullfinch reminds me of something old and safe – about something that never changes.
I am still looking after and waiting for to see a sight of a willow tit (hömötiainen) even though I am aware that the nature around does not serve its needs anymore. The lost of old forest areas and diversity of nature has made the breed endangered.
The birds touch me in a special way. Leaving, moving, and returning are their yearly habits, something they do to survive. There has been something similar in our behavior. For me it’s partly been my own choice, partly what life has taken me into. Moving, getting lost, learning new, changing, and settling down in a new environment. Leaving again, returning again. Not always recognizing the old anymore; nothing but at the same time everything has changed while I have been away. Usually it is my mind set that needs to adapt itself and find the balance between old and new.
I wonder if the birds are facing something similar. Not that their mind sets would change but due to the climate change the environment changes. How can the birds adapt to this?
Due to climate change and the lost of the diversity of nature the birds, among the many other animal species, have already faced the reality and necessity of moving and changing. In the book Birds and the climate – a journey to a changing nature (2020) Maria Pihlajaniemi writes: “As habitats change, species and individuals have three options. They can try to adapt and change themselves. Or they can start moving and look for a new habitat elsewhere. If they are unable to do either of these, only the last option remains: to fade away quietly.”
Both birds and humans are facing the changing environment due to climate change. The plants and animals react to the change around us all the time. The birds have started to move already, and environmental migration will be the future of many people as well.
Leaving, returning, and changing. There is something that interests me. If we must leave, can we return anymore? If we return, do we recognize the old? How can we adapt to the new? How do we change?
OUT OF URGENCY
THIS IS MY LAND
I am super happy to be part of this project, feels like a perfect fit!
Last year I premiered my art-activism -project MITT OPPRØR MOT OPPDRITT which can be translated to RAGE AGAINST THE FISHFARM MACHINE, a little bit about MITT OPPRØR MOT OPPDRITT: Cross-border art and activism around the theme of aquaculture and the value of wild nature. Large parts of Karlsøya are nature reserves due to a rich diversity of cultural landscapes in the form of rare growths and ancient forest. In 2015, politicians in the municipality of Karlsøy decided to create a fish farm at Korsnes (Karlsøy) and Samuelsen decided to start this project as a protest against it.
And what has changed in this battle for nature in Karlsøy? Well, now we have more fish farm sites in Karlsøy: So the title OUT OF URGENCY really resonates with me and my part in this project. I will continue my work with protecting the wild nature using art as a weapon. I feel charged and inspired. And I feel the power of togetherness in this project!
Currently I’m working with OUT OF URGENCY in different ways:
Movement
Text
Talking to people
Sounds
Site-specific
Text inspiration/improvisation after digital meeting with Tanja, John and Per:
THIS IS MY LAND
I WILL DO WHATEVER I CAN, TO MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND
THIS IS MY LAND, MAN
THIS IS OUR LAND, AND I WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND
WE HAVE TO RECLAIM OUR LAND
THIS IS MY LAND
OUT OF URGENCY impro-session: Dans på kaia på Karlsøya, 12.06.20
From MITT OPPRØR MOT OPPDRITT Photographer: Eivind Hansen
Tanja Råman and John Collingswood from TaikaBox write about creative strategies one must adopt while working on an international dance project under the restrictions of the current COVID-19 pandemic. What can be done when performances and workshops are cancelled? As sensory experiences – essential for dance artists – are restricted, how to respond to the challenge and work together anyway?
Full article HERE
Annie Leonard writes in The Nation
The fossil fuel industry is in trouble and has a sneaky idea for saving itself: It wants to produce lots more plastic. Many people don’t realize it, but almost all plastic is made from fossil fuels. So the same oil and gas companies whose products have overheated the planet are also behind the mountains of plastic that litter our communities, beaches, and oceans.
Almost 40 percent of the world’s ocean surface is now covered by swirling gyres of plastic that never fully decompose and kill countless numbers of fish and other marine animals. Much of this is single-use plastic—bottles, bags, and other items designed to be used once and thrown away.
Now, as pressure grows to phase out fossil fuels in the name of climate survival, industry giants including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron Phillips envision increased plastic production as an economic lifeline. The petrochemical industry has announced investments of more than $200 billion since 2010 to expand production capacity in the United States. To greenwash this apparent effort to lock in increased plastics use for decades to come, the industry is doubling down on a public relations claim it first crafted 40 years ago: Plastic recycling will stop plastic pollution. That is a lie almost as brazen as these same companies’ lie that their products don’t cause global warming. In fact, only 9 percent of all mass-produced plastic ever created has actually been recycled.
Greenpeace, where I work, is collaborating with scientists, public officials, and activists around the world to defeat this assault on public and planetary health, and we believe the battle is shifting in our favor. Ten years ago, the oil industry appeared unstoppable. The oil industry’s business model is built on the myth of perpetually increasing demand. Fracking and other new technologies were opening new vistas of production. Capital expenditures for exploration, drilling, pipelines, and other infrastructure soared on the assumption that “if you build it, they will come.”
The landscape has changed dramatically since then. Warnings from scientists of the reality and costs of climate change are clear. Climate emergencies are unfolding in real time as Australia erupts into flames, the Caribbean suffers one record-breaking hurricane after another, and drought crushes farmers across Africa’s Sahel. Youth-led climate strikes have raised the political stakes, and more and more governments are calling for versions of a Green New Deal that will leave fossil fuels in the ground. Even the financial class is souring on fossil fuels, as some of the world’s largest investment companies have said they will stop financing climate destabilizing projects like Arctic oil drilling. We are finally able to see, on the horizon, a world beyond fossil fuels.
Yet even as we press for a rapid, equitable transition to climate-friendly energy sources, we must recognize that fossil fuel production will continue unless the vast majority of single-use plastics also are phased out. There are limited cases where single-use plastics may make sense—for example, in the masks and other protective gear health workers must wear to treat coronavirus patients. But corporate profit maximization, not human need, is the reason production of single-use plastics has soared in recent decades. For example, Unilever pioneered the “sachet economy,” which markets products in single-serve plastic packages to appeal to low-income consumers unable to afford larger quantities of the deodorant or shampoo on offer. Sachets overwhelm municipal waste infrastructure systems and cannot be recycled, imposing an intrusive double standard that exploits inequity. As with most environmental scourges, the resulting pollution hits people of color and poor and working-class communities hardest.
And the plastics industry is determined to keep expanding for decades. The industry’s $200 billion of planned new investment, spread across over 340 projects, aims to triple global production by 2050 (link here). ExxonMobil alone pledges to invest more than $20 billion over 10 years in what it calls “Growing the Gulf,” an initiative to enlarge production at “more than a dozen major chemical, refining, lubricant and liquified natural gas projects” along the Texas and Louisiana coasts.
Predictably omitted from ExxonMobil’s dubious PR claims, which include a promise to create “tens of thousands of jobs,” is the fact that the industry’s expansion is made possible partly by massive government subsidies—in other words, by taxpayers. The new petrochemical plant ExxonMobil is building in Texas with a subsidiary of the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco received an estimated $460 million in subsidies. Exxon received around $62 million in 2017 alone for its Louisiana refineries and plastics production. Shell received $1.6 billion in state subsidies for its Pennsylvania ethane cracker.
Joining the petrochemical industry in its “plastics forever” dream are consumer goods companies such as Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that have been packaging an increasing share of their products in single-use plastic. The companies’ bottles and containers often become part of the 8 million metric tons of plastic that enter the oceans every year. Some of those discarded consumer items end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gigantic swirl of debris halfway between Hawaii and California that is roughly the size of the state of Alaska. Plastic has also been found in more than 60 percent of all seabirds and in 100 percent of sea turtles.
Despite these horror stories, industry’s answer is not to limit the production of single-use plastic; it wants to increase production while posing as good corporate citizens by claiming that all those additional shopping bags, shampoo bottles, and vegetable cartons can be recycled. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste sounds like the name of an environmentally righteous organization, but the group is in fact sponsored by ExxonMobil, Chevron Phillips, Shell, Dow, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and dozens of other giant corporations. In their view, the culprit is not plastic but “plastic waste,” which Procter & Gamble’s CEO David Taylor piously affirms “does not belong in our oceans or anywhere in the environment.” The solution, they say, is better waste management and more recycling. But decades of experience and scientific studies have demonstrated that plastics recycling simply doesn’t work, at least not at the scale commensurate with ever-increasing plastic production and marketing. A peer-reviewed survey of the nation’s 367 recycling facilities found that only PET #1 and HDPE #2 plastic bottles and jugs may legitimately be labeled as recyclable.
Instead of these false solutions, what’s truly needed is clear. To tackle the plastics crisis, we need to stop producing so much plastic in the first place. To that end, we should pressure consumer goods companies to end their reliance on single-use plastic and instead invest in “reuse and refill” consumption models. Governments should ban unnecessary applications of single-use plastics, such as plastic shopping bags, and stop subsidizing fossil fuels as well. Individuals can refuse to buy unnecessary plastics, seek out alternatives, and embrace a “reduce and reuse” lifestyle.
Ultimately, the plastics crisis is rooted in the short-term convenience-over-everything throwaway culture that corporations encourage. We need to reject their seductive narratives that buying disposable stuff supposedly brings personal fulfillment. Under today’s paradigm, we are extracting fossil fuels at enormous economic and social cost to manufacture products that people use for minutes but will pollute for generations. Does that really make sense for anything but these corporations’ profit margins?
The plastics crisis and the climate crisis are two fronts in the same battle. We cannot end the era of single-use plastics without stopping the fossil fuel industry, and we cannot stop the fossil fuel industry without ending single-use plastics. Join us. Together, we can build a cleaner, healthier future for everyone.
An Australian perspective on the crisis state of the world by Crispin Hull writing in the Canberra Times:
Just as the bushfire crisis was a flaw-exposing dress rehearsal that helped Australia deal with the COVID-19 crisis, the COVID-19 crisis should itself be a dress rehearsal for possibly worse things to come. And the most recent report of the Commission for the Human Future suggests that we would do well to prepare for them.
Indeed, the report suggests we need more than the traditional Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to illustrate the threats, which can be summarised as follows:
The report says that, until COVID-19 shook humanity and government, optimism abounded for several decades whereas people calling for fairness, equity or warning of limits to growth and risks were ignored or suppressed. The commission is an Australian organisation, headed by former Opposition leader John Hewson.
Critically the 10 threats it identifies are intertwined. So, they require a complete change in thinking. Over-population, though, is the linking issue.
For example, pandemic diseases, like COVID-19, arise in the first place as a consequence of overcrowding, destruction of forests and the wild world, increased trade in wild animals, farming practices, international transport and dense urban living conditions.
Of course, when a pandemic hits, it hits hard and immediately, so people and governments move quickly. People are at death’s door. Given the choice between money or your life, people choose life.
The other threats seem less immediate, so many governments and people ignore or deny them. The lesson from COVID-19 must be that ignorance and denial put us in peril. Most nations were woefully unprepared for COVID-19, but the response could be quickly ramped up. With things like climate change, chemical pollution and water and food security, however, by the time the damage seriously manifests itself, systems already in place will have put things beyond repair, irrespective of what immediate action people and governments take.
Put simply, if the world goes back to business as usual when (or if) the COVID-19 crisis ends, humanity will return to an apocalyptic trajectory. We should think and act on this soon, while the memory of COVID-19 is fresh enough to keep us alert to the perilous fragility of humankind.
I have long thought that one of the single most significant forces against changing the way we do things is the ever-increasing power and influence of for-profit corporations.
For-profit corporations can do a lot of good. They can raise capital. They can separate capital and management so entrepreneurial endeavours benefit from the talent of people who do not have the capital.
But corrosion sets in when the pursuit of profit suborns everything else – as it almost invariably does without well-enforced legal and regulatory structures to prevent and correct the sort of malfeasance we saw with the banking royal commission and any number of other inquiries into corporate behaviour.
William Dalrymple, in his excellent book The Anarchy, details the genesis of corporate excess in the appalling conduct of the East India Company in the 18th century. Not much has changed.
Corporations can run rings around governments. In the past few decades they have become so big and multinational that they can manipulate or at least influence elections in democracies through advertising directly to voters, secretly lobbying politicians and swaying political parties to their will though donations. In autocracies they get the same result through bribes. Their aim is not the general welfare of society but increased profits for themselves, especially though lower taxation and regulation.
They extract whatever resources they can from the planet at the cheapest or zero price, without a thought beyond the next quarterly profit-and-loss figures.
The COVID-19 crisis has put their political activity into hibernation for now. Political leaders, in Australia and many other countries, by-and-large, have been able to act without the poisonous influence of big corporations. But they will be back.
Now is the time to prune their influence. We should ban all political donations by for-profit corporations. We should require every MP to log and publish details of every meeting with every lobbyist.
There could be a quid pro quo here. Many have suggested a return to what they see as the halcyon days of government ownership in areas like banking, telecommunications, railways, airlines, airports, electricity and water.
But they forget the inefficiencies of government-ownership that can be pruned out with the profit motive and the separation of management and capital. However, we should never again allow ourselves to be fooled that industries can self-regulate or be trusted to do the right thing when the profit motive is so powerful.
There is no substitute for tough, independent, regular spot auditing to ensure compliance with environmental, health, safety and other requirements.
So, by all means keep the government out of industry participation and allow capitalism and markets freedom up to a point. That point being industry staying out of using its money to buy influence in politics and for industry to accept a return to effective regulation.
Without reining in the for-profit corporations, the very worthy aim of meeting the threats identified by the Commission for the Human Future will be almost impossible.
Oakland-based band Thao and the Get Down Stay Down had planned to be on tour this Spring, but have been stuck in their homes in quarantine.
Instead, they have turned their energies to making a music video for their new single. Equipped with stable wi-fi and metronomes, the band created, rehearsed and shot this video all using the conferencing platform Zoom.
It illustrates the method of starting with the available technology and choreographing within its restrictions whilst pushing its creative possibilities.
Towards the end of March 2020, TaikaBox had planned to host a 3-day research seminar for the Dance Artists in Barents project.
Due to the global restrictions in travel and gathering imposed to combat the spread of the Covid-19 virus, it was not possible for the artists to travel from Sweden, Norway, Germany and Russia – nor for the artists and guests from Finland to get together.
We decided to move the research days online and used Skype to connect the participants, host meetings and run workshops.
I would like to reflect a little on todays virtual work day as well as the general situation and feeling of things happening in and around us right now.
Because of COVID-19 we are pretty much out of work as are most of all the other freelancers and artists we know. We are also quaranteened from going to train at the moment, so having Danse artists in Barents, dansinitiativet and Taikabox organize it so that our Dancing on the margins of climate change project continues and we are having a two day dance seminar virtually from our living rooms is brilliant.
This has been the first time for all of us participants of the project dancing together with someone who is not really there, but only virtually present. It brings challenges but also hope for different methods in difficult times. For us being a duo, it was definitely hard at times to be present for each other, for the space around us, and also for everyone else present throug the little screenes. Sharing your attention without loosing the beauty of full presence in present moment and space is a taxing task. Often beautiful moments still spurred, when we organically let ourselves be influenced by each others movement and also gave artistic freedom for ripples, for the consequences and feelings that the present moment and movement cause. Even many moments that felt a bit lost, actually have a feel of connection, which you can see for yourself in the video from todays virtual workshop linked to this post.
We did our movement exploration to “a musical piece related to the Sars0-CoV-2, or the Covid-19 and its genome sequence. It is an “Positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus” piece created by Tomi Knuutila. So we were dancing out the soundtrack of Corona. It was really interesting to see the different approaches taken on this composition. How as in any dance creation you can move from your body parts, from feelings, narratives, associations etc. For us the soundtrack had the feel of not being in control, kind of like the situation with the virus, how we can manipulate our habits and let fear guide us and try to avoid any human contact but we will still never have full control over it. The sound of corona still tumbles over us in it’s glitchy manner.
For us, partnering and touch is what we work with every day, being very very close to people. It has been extremely surreal to avoid any touch with anyone else than each other. It has also been interesting to feel how from the majority of people you can sense not just a desire to keep a physical barrior with a stranger but also emotional. I have felt a lot of fear from people even in situations where it feels quite insane, but hey the situation in the world is insane… so for us this feel of not controlling that the music evoke brought up themes of fear, fear of people, fear of air, fear of touch, fear of germs, fear of unknown. Strong feelings, that then produce certain qualities in movement, some more abstract and others as concrete as washing hands.
All in all it was a great day, great group of people and we look forwards to what tomorrow brings! And, in a long run what the future brings, if we are in the beginning now of creating a sustainable practice of dancing in virtual studios and eventually touring virtually dance pieces that have been created through virtual collaboration. This is a positive vision compared to not dancing and the field of performing arts slowly dying, but of course I will always love moving with real people for real people, not just in our next best thing, the virtual real-time.
In this post, I describe some basic methods to look at data and information from an artistic point of view. The zen-like question What is the Sound of Climate Change? will be given one possible answer out of many. I’ll discuss data and information usage in arts briefly, and also show you some techniques and methods how I do things, trying to keep things simple – and hopefully interesting as well.
Information has been used in artistic practises for quite some time. For simplicity’s sake in this post I mostly talk about information (or data) visualisation and sonification (changing data to sound). This should be thought of as a smaller subset of a bigger, amorphous field of creative practices, often referred to as Information Arts, or Art and Science collaboration. In this post I’m mostly ignoring the various discussions for and against art and science collaborations, and assuming that I can take this field as a more or less granted, existing and well established field in which many contemporary artists work with. For the curious, to dive deeper in this topic I suggest the great book Information Arts by Stephen Wilson — or browsing through the 50+ years of archives of the Leonardo Journal, although many good sources exist.
Although algorithms have been used in visual art and music-making throughout centuries — e.g Musical dice games, (in which small precomposed parts of music were combined together to produce a final composition by throwing the dice) were quite popular throughout the 18th century. Of course information visualisation has also a long history in science popularisation and it has been vital in explaining numerical data in books, magazines and newspapers. The current era information usage in arts rose in popularity in the mid 20th century as composers, painters and other artists started exploring methods, such as controlled randomness, chance and mathematical patterns and algorithms to produce (aleatoric) music, visual art and even choreographic movements. These techniques can be seen paradoxically on one hand supporting many avant-garde movements’ ideals of diminishing the originality, talent and ingenuity of the artist, but on the other hand the methods introduced new expressive possibilities, techniques and tools to artistic practice. Artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Marcel Duchamp who pioneered these methods are currently regarded more or less as genius.
For me these two aspects are interesting: producing visuals and sounds – of which I don’t have complete control – is an artistic practice I feel comfortable with, and getting interesting and unpredictable results is something which, for me, nourishes the creative output. So essentially I see working with machines, technologies, software and programming as tools with which I iteratively collaborate. I have used algorithms, data and information to create melodies and drum patterns, manipulate music, change shapes, colours, size and appearance of graphical elements, animating them, and even using data to determine video editing cut points. While many people argue that computers, algorithms or AI cannot be creative, I would credit them for a huge part in many things which I do. Some experiments in moving image and sound can be found in my ongoing 100 video art works project.
In 2009 I premiered my interactive installation Climatable. While the installation was mainly built as a testing ground for sensor-based interaction focusing on simplicity, it worked also as climate change information visualisation and sonification tool. As climate change is quite a complex topic, quite a lot of research was needed in order to find out what kinds of various indicators were used in science, although many of these were already familiar as graphs seen in articles and news. Out of the multitude I finally chose four different data sets. Some data sets had to be rejected since there were too many gaps in the measurements, some was from a too brief time period, and in some rare cases I also had to fill in some gaps by calculating an average value out of surrounding values. It can be argued that I chose data sets which supported my initial gut feeling that the data is escalating. Then again, as framing a photograph is an act of power, so is selecting a dataset, and it is good to be aware of this. It is impossible or at least foolish to put together a visualisation or sonification of all possible data sets related to climate change data, and some selection had to be made. The chosen data sets for me were representative, interesting, consistent, descriptive and expressive: representing one side of the phenomenon; interesting what they told about the phenomenon, consistent so that there were no gaps and descriptive about how climate is changing and expressing how climate change sounds and looks like in a different way than typical news article graph.
A derivative of the project is the sound of climate change minimalistic video, a media art work or a musical piece, which in my opinion illustrates the five selection criteria. As the video states, it uses global annual mean temperature data from Nasa Goddard institute between 1880-2014 (please listen until the end, or at least jump to the 1950’s and listen onwards from there to get the point):
After turning the data into sound and hearing the change in the last two decades or so for the first time I was astonished, and still am when I hear the piece. It is worth stating again that the music (or sound in this case) is not “composed”, improvised, manipulated manually, or played according to some instructions found in the data. The sound is manipulated based on the data, one could almost say the sound is the data (although this would be quite and exaggeration. In this case what I have defined is the sound file to be played / looped, and what it sounds like when the data is at its lowest and highest values. So, yes I know it will sound drastic, but when does it sound drastic or mellow I really don’t know beforehand. If you checked out the video you know when the drastic things happen.
So let me illustrate more clearly the workflow I used to create the sound piece. This might get a bit technical, but I hope you’ll bear with me:
Lastly I leave you with a musical piece related to the Sars0-CoV-2, or the Covid-19 and its genome sequence. It is an “Positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus”, and online one can find quite many scans of the same virus (over 400 by the time of writing this post). The genetic code, the genome sequence data is represented it two ways: the nucleotide sequence, ie. bases in the molecule with letters a, c, g, and t (although rna typically is said to have a,c,g and u? My knowledge about dna and rna sequencing is limited, so please correct any mistakes I might make) and the Protein sequence translation, in which three to five bases form a codon, which is related to one of the 20 different proteins, or a stop character. These are represented by ascii letters, e.g genes 27749..27880 translates as MIELSLIDFYLCFLAFLLFLVLIMLIIFWFSLELQDHNETCHA. The NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) site provides some tools to see and do these translations. Thus we have at least two kinds of patterns to work with: the four bases, which I have used as melody notes in the example below and as a drum machine , and the translated proteins, which could be intrepreted as chords, more complex melodical patterns, rules to guide tempo, or dynamics etc to create more complex musical melodies — as Markus J. Buehler obviously has done in the beautiful musical pieces which can be found on his SoundCloud page. So we do give some control to the pattern, but still make creative decisions.
This blog post is written for TaikaBox dance research days, instead of being in Oulu in person and meeting with dance and media artists — the meeting was cancelled due to the virus threat. As you might realise I am not a dance expert although I have worked with them somewhat. The interesting thing for me to find about is whether using data in an artistic practice is seen as an interesting method to try out, especially when we step outside of representing it with media — via text, graphics or sound. For me, hearing the sound of climate change: the escalation in the audio output, in the seemingly small looking measurement changes, was truly a moment in which I experienced climate change in a new way, unlike the graphs I had seen. Perhaps using data to control the dancer around the stage, or to guide choreographic movements is an idea which never should have been brought forth, but who knows? Not at least without trying something out.
Yesterday John asked me to post some thoughts I had shared with Tanja and him via Email. They had just informed us all the residency I would present to next week had been cancelled because of coronavirus.
In my Email reply to the news, I wrote:
uncommonly heavy, unseasonal torrential rain. Ivory traders from the East African coast carried some of those plague rats north to ports in what remained of the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately, due to the current situation with the Covid-19 virus alert, the Oulu Research days have been cancelled and we will conduct research online with Skype meetings and working on this blog.
The new show from Norwegian company Frikar is touring Norway this Spring. Looks good.
– Situationen är mycket allvarlig. Hälften av de som kan flytta har redan börjat packa, och sälja av det som de äger, det säger Lena som lägger fram smörgåspålägg i en kyldisk i en mataffär i Nikels centrum.
– De som inte kan flytta, som jag, vi sitter och väntar med rädslan i kroppen för vad som ska hända, säger Lena.
Nickelfabriken är stadens enda stora arbetsgivare. Nikel är en monostad, städer som under sovjetisk tid byggdes kring en dominerande arbetsplats.
När fabriken läggs ner kan vissa anställda få nya jobb, bara de flyttar. För en ensamstående mamma, som Lena, utan koppling till fabriken eller kapital att vare sig flytta eller köpa ny lägenhet, är framtiden mycket oviss.
– Jag uppfostrar mitt barn, helt själv men jag ska hitta ett sätt att lämna Nikel för det kommer att bli omöjligt att överleva på den här platsen säger Lena.
Som så många andra siktar hon på Moskva, på att bli en del av den våg av flyttande ryssar som får Moskva och andra ryska städer att växa. Lena vill bli en av de som lever, som de i Moskva.
– Bara Moskva lever, andra bara överlever, säger Lena.
Alla är berörda av det som händer med fabriken i den arktiska staden Nikel. Borta vid ost-disken står två äldre damer och man behöver bara ställa frågan så blir det en väldans diskussion.
– Vi är pensionärer, vi behöver inte pengar, det är de unga, som har familjer, som behöver en inkomst, säger en dam och de fortsätter att diskutera som om mikrofonen inte fanns, så vi går ut.
Utanför affären faller snön som dasslock. Att vilja lämna Nikel är inte nytt. Nickelfabriken har förorenat hela området, hela staden, även långt in i Norge på andra sidan gränsen, och det i flera decennier.
Naturen runt fabriken har sett ut som en ofruktbar öken mitt i Arktis.
Utanför affären står Valentina med tre väninnor.
– Jag har väntat på mitt tillstånd för att kunna lämna ”Norden” i 20 år, säger Valentina.
Hon har bott i Nikel i 37 år, och tycker mycket, mycket om staden och alla de som bor där. Men Valentina har, under hela Vladimir Putins tid vid makten, stått i en kö för att få byta sin lägenhet mot en annan någon annanstans i Ryssland. Men inget händer.
Valentina vill söderut till regionen kring staden Vladimir, inte så långt från Moskva. Hon har ingen familj där, men Vladimir är hennes hembygd.
Uppe vid den enorma Nickelfabriken är det svart i snön.
Trots massivt snöfall i flera dagar så är snön ändå som en gråsvart öken runt fabriken och i dimman syns röken puffa och puffla ur skorstenarna utan uppehåll. Men ännu är Nikel inte dött.
Den internationella språkskolan i Nikel har precis öppnat. En vacker lokal med högt i tak, lekhörna och sköna färgglada soffor. Engelska och norska lärs ut, gränsen till Norge är bara några mil bort, det finns också idéer om gemensam arktisk fjällturism i framtiden.
– Folk försöker lära sig utländska språk och närma sig Norge, framtiden finns i vänskapen mellan Norge och Ryssland, säger Julia Frolenkova som jobbar på språkskolan. Det finns bra sidor med att fabriken läggs ner, tycker hon.
– Det kommer att bli en bättre miljö och alla kommer att komma hit för att njuta av de arktiska landskapen, tror Julia som tror på ”Norden”, på de ryska nordliga städerna längs med kusten till Norra ishavet.
På språkskolan jobbar också Nadja, med bokföringen.
– Folk flyttar, det gjorde de även innan nyheten om att fabriken ska stänga, och det är kopplat till miljön, säger Nadja.
Hon minns hur det var när barnen växte upp.
– När barnen var små brukade jag ta vagnen och gå ut på promenad. När vinden förde röken med föroreningar till staden blev löven på träden gula, säger Nadja.
Det är grönare nu, men Nadja och hennes familj ska flytta så fort de kan. Med sorg i hjärtat, säger Nadja. Trots livet på tundran eller kanske tack vare det, så är folk bra i Nikel-
– De är som en enda stor familj, säger Nadja.
Jesper Lindau, korrespondent i Ryssland
jesper.lindau@sverigesradio.se
Over a lovely dinner with two of my best friends a few days ago we had a wide discussion about climate change. They both work quite specific with climate change, in two different ways. One of them has worked within Greenpeace Nordic for the last, lets say 15 years, and the other is running a Leadership project – Meeting Point for Green Development together with his colleagues at the garden Under Tallarna outside of Stockholm Sweden.
For some reason, I don’t remember why, Ivan described a video of the first surgeon that was operating inside a Mammoth, as he remembered it. Because of the permafrost, or the ice is melting, new preserved Mammoths are arriving from the ice.
I was telling them a bit about our super inspiring conference (that also included some hard and depressive facts), Dancing on the Margins of Climate Change that we had in December 2019. I mentioned the problems with the permafrost that the scientist Keith Larson was talking about during his presentation, read more about his presentation here…
Yannick connect the two stories to a fresh programme from Vetenskapens värld that he have seen were a scientist wants to revive mammoths to prevent the permafrost from continuing to melt. Its a bit science fictional and maybe unrealistic, although fascinating. Have a look!
Dancing on the Margins of Climate Change