Adaptation–Art and the Internet of Things
The exhibit Adaptation took place in CRCLR, an experimental center for sustainable and artistic practices. It ran as part of Berlin’s Tech Open Air festival, “Europe’s leading interdisciplinary technology festival”. It is an opportunity for people from different parts of the technology world to come together and reflect on the different ways that human experience in the form of health, mindfulness, and social justice is encountering aspects of technology such as: virtual reality, design, artificial intelligence.
This particular exhibit focused on the ‘internet of things’ (IoT), a term used to describe the interconnection between everyday computing devices via internet. This interconnection allows such connected devices to exchange data in a seamless manner, which ensures our everyday interaction with technology that we almost take for granted: checking Facebook on your phone, or even paying for your morning coffee with mobile wallets such as Apple Pay.
The artists exhibiting their work at Adaptation paired up with tech companies involved in a European Commission funded research project called AGILE. This project describes itself as a “modular gateway for managing smart IoT devices and data”. To do so, it provides different software and hardware solutions. The exhibit explored the ways in which art can use data to provide a commentary on contemporary technology. The artists covered four different topics, entitled: Quantified Self, Smart Cities, Interactive Spaces, Environment + Data.
Quantified Self: E-Camera
The Artists associated with this exhibit are Luisa Fabrizi and Andre Landwehr. When I stepped into the small photo booth that they had set up, they immediately handed me a biometric heart rate detector, which I clipped on to the tip of my right index finger. This little sensor enabled the artists to pick up on my heart rate and body temperature. This data was fed into a processor that they had, and would influence the resulting picture that the webcam they had places in front of me would take. If my heart rate went up, the resulting picture would get more distorted.
The way that this camera is affected by the data that is fed into it aims to allow the picture taking process to take into account the current state of the user, instead of capturing the user as any other inanimate object. It is an interesting interplay between the user’s current emotional state and how the data interprets it, through the heart rate and body temperature sensors. The exhibition flyer describes this process as the picture being “enriched, almost distorted, by an evocative interpretation of the photographer’s emotional state”. The artists hope that this interaction between data and emotion provides a new approach to photography and how people have become more and more quantified. The artists seem to pose the question of whether our quantification can still live in harmony with the aspects of our humanity that cannot so easily be encapsulated in numbers.
Smart Cities: Floral Automation
Floral Automation was an exhibit prepared by the French-British artist Thomas Grogan. It consisted of a metal frame, which contained several fans, a water pump, speakers, and screens displaying flowers blooming. All of these electric components were connected to different sensors that were placed outside the exhibition space. The sensors detected different levels of the environmental conditions that day. Grogan had sensors to detect the light strength, temperature, and CO2 concentration of that (abnormally) gray July morning. These sensors then translated the different data captured from the environment into electrical signals, which were consequently fed into the steel frame. Depending on the amount of each unit measure in the surrounding, the electrical components on the frame would react differently. For example, if the temperature was relatively high, the fans would spin relatively faster, thus cooling the environment. This was meant to emulate an ecosystem regulating itself. The electrical signal received from the CO2 levels would be used to power the water pump, and the electricity obtained from the light levels would power speakers to play sounds of nature such as birdsong and rainfall. Ultimately, all of these data would converge to regulate the speed of the video that was playing on the small screens. The more optimal that the environmental data would be, the faster the buds displayed on the screens would turn into flowers.
The data captured from the actual environment then, as the artist describes it, “becomes a material to mimic biological processes and question the authenticity of our surroundings”. In this way, the artist is programming an environment, whereas we are so used to environments being natural and self-regulating. I saw this exhibit as a reflection on human interaction with our natural world, and how we have come to believe that we master natural processes, aided by our technical knowledge. This artificial reproduction of such a natural process as the growth of plants illustrates programmable environments, something which I feel is not meant to be within reach of human beings, as we are highly dependent on and inseparable from our environment.
Interactive Spaces: Still Touchable?
This interactive artwork by Yeon Sue and Souneil Park explores the relationship that we have in our contemporary world with information. Whereas in the past our relationship with information was exclusively physical, nowadays our relationship has become virtual. The only way that we interact with information anymore is by the click of a mouse, or the touch of a screen. I was given a sensor to hold with me as I walked into the exhibition space. I walked up to a book filled with little postcards. As soon as I touched the book, a screen switched on to my right side, showing plastic cut-out letters falling one by one onto a table.
The postcards I was looking at reflected the personal approach to communication that has nowadays been hijacked by exchanges of strings of text over a programmed platform. The letters falling one by one made me think about how written language and its ability for human connection is losing its power in our digital age. Sure enough, a second later a screen flicked on with lines of code, constantly updating themselves. One could notice the immateriality of this data displayed on the screen. It certainly didn’t speak to me as much as the book of postcards. The artists want to ask us the question of whether it will be possible to retrieve a physical relationship with our modes of communication and relating to others. Perhaps the answer lies in making sure technology interacts with human feeling and uniqueness.
Environment + Data: Fountains
Justus Harris and Eric Dolores teamed up in this artistic project to explore the conditions of bodies of water in different parts of the world, and their effect on human lives. They collected data on the turbidity (murkiness) of water from the Great Lakes in the United States, which was fed into an AGILE gateway. Turbidity is usually seen as a good measure of the quality of water. To represent this data, however, they played one tone of music that would change pitch depending on how high or low the number of turbidity the data represented. This is a quick way to represent data in a way that I could very quickly relate to. I could easily become aware of the fluctuations of the quality of the water.
To make the experience even more relatable, Harris and Dolores projected an animated video containing 3D scans of two people from India and the U.S., both suffering from unsafely turbid water consumption. This video also contained still shots of turbid and clean water. The video was accompanied by voice recordings of these two people, recounting their experience with unsafe drinking water. In this way, Harris and Dolores humanized the data that they were receiving and placed this seemingly objective data in a particular context unique to these people that were being displayed on the screen, and who were speaking into my ears. It allowed me to break through the technical side of the data being collected, and to step into someone’s real lived experience with such an environmental problem. It showed me that data and art can collaborate to convey an important message.