Systemness: towards a data aesthetics of climate change (2011)

Systemness: Towards a Data Aesthetics of Climate Change
Tom Corby



At the time of writing, the science, technology and particularly data of
climate change have become both the object and subject of public debate.
While this process has often thrown up more heat than light, it does
demonstrate how central understandings of the science of climate change
have become to our social and political cultures at large.

In this chapter I wish to explore how this situation offers opportunities
for artists to develop work around environmental change using its measuring
and prediction technologies. In doing so I make reference to The Southern
Ocean Studies a project made in collaboration with Gavin Baily and Jonathan
Mackenzie, and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and I situate this work
in a wider historical and theoretical field by drawing upon on the writings
of Felix Guattari and Gregory Bateson. I go on to develop a series of
arguments for a redeployment of the technologies and data of climate change
beyond their normative cognitive and analytical functions. I show through
practice that climate data has an affective dimension that can produce
representations of environmental complexity as an expression of the
systems, feedback mechanisms and the modulations of ecological interaction
operative in the environment. Finally I propose how this work produces a
convergence-divergence model of collaboration between artists and
scientists that respects interdisciplinary boundaries but which share a
linked goal of developing understanding and experiences of our changing
environment.

There is much to be said about the complex issues surrounding the use of
(mostly carbon fuelled) electronic technologies. This chapter is not the
place for that discussion but I would like to start by briefly exploring
Felix Guattari's ideas concerning the role of the arts, science and
technology in environmental discourse as described in The Three Ecologies
and his final book Chaosmosis. In this project Guattari formulates ecology
as a system that must include and interact with human subjectivity by
conceiving of it as three interacting domains: the social, mental and
natural, all equally susceptible to differing forms of pollution. Borrowing
the term ecosophy from Arnold Naess he produces an analysis of ecological
disaster based on a critique of an Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) that
works at the behest of global markets to pervert science and media
technologies. Through a machinic enslavement of the world's resources, IWC
uses science and technology to pollute the natural environment, infantilize
social relations and produce a passive 'mass media subjectivity' that
smothers impulses to engage in socially meaningful activity (Guattari,
2008: 22).

Guattari's critique of technology however is not exclusively dismal. He
concedes that responses to environmental degradation will become
increasingly reliant on technological interventions and cautions that
'media fatalism' will undermine the necessary use of technology to develop
global solutions to the environmental crisis through a 're-shaping of the
objectives of material and immaterial assets'. So we can say that part of
Guattari's project in The Three Ecologies is to reclaim science and
technology as forms of ethical and creative praxis (a machinic ecology)
that working with and through the aesthetic and ethical sensibilities of
the arts 'transversally' (Guattari, 1989: 131-147) can contribute to the
general transformation of subjectivities required to respond to
environmental catastrophe:

Computerization in particular has unleashed the potential for new forms
of 'exchange' of value, new collective negotiations, whose ultimate
product will be […] more dissensual forms of social action. Our task -
one which encompasses the whole future of research and artistic
production - is not only to bring these exchanges into existence; it is
to extend notions of collective interest to encompass practices which,
in the short term, 'profit' no one, but which are, in the long run,
vehicles of processual enrichment. (Guattari, 1989: 131-147)

For Guattari this process develops as an interdisciplinary ethical and
aesthetic project; changed perspectives on ecological interactions can
only arise from the continued development of new perspectives to prevent
ossification of subjectivities. The artist is a role model or exemplar of
this process as they have the freedom to continuously reinvent their
practice by drawing up contingent alliances with other disciplines and
routing themselves around impeding institutional and economic frameworks.
Any practitioner who engages with producing forms of subjectification
through media or technological practice Guattari argues, has an ethical
responsibility to engage through creative process to prevent stagnation and
social passivity.

Alongside this critique of the mass media, is an analysis of postmodernist
cultural production as promoting similarly conservative and stultifying
tendencies. Postmodernism is sophistic, an impasse of language that has
'accustomed us to a vision of the world in which human interventions' in
concrete ecological and social issues 'are no longer relevant' (Guattari,
1989: 34). By framing the experience of the natural environment as an
effect of language reduced through deconstruction to a cultural construct,
it denies 'the systematic (relational) and situational (participatory)
ecological structures which provide the enabling conditions for the lives
of those doing the representing' (Dudgeon, 2008: 72). Rather than signal a
break with the past, postmodernism inherits modernisms tendency to separate
out culture from nature by bracketing out the possibility for embodied
forms of engagement or understanding of ecological experience outside of
the linguistic turn. Postmodern culture/nature dualism is but a short step
from the Cartesian schema that has ultimately produced the ecological
crisis we now face, as it denies complex interdependencies. To understand
the systemic entanglements 'between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the
social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think
'transversally' (Guattari, 1989: 135), i.e. across, through and between
disciplinary structures.

After dispensing with capitalism, Cartesian and postmodern thinking,
Guattari turns his fire on the 'archaizing, folkloristic tendencies'
(1989: 135) of what might be described as an older ecological movement
rooted in romantically inflected models of nature as wilderness. Ecology is
a complex interrelation of interacting social, mental and natural registers
within which technology is irreversibly embedded:

We frequently continue to oppose the machine to the human sprit.
Certain philosophies hold that modern technology has blocked access to
our ontological foundations, to primordial being. And what if, on the
contrary, revival of spirit and human values could be attendant upon a
new alliance with machines? (Guattari, 1996: 267)

Guattari's thinking overlapped with an emerging debate in ecology that
conceptualized it as a series of complex interactions between natural and
social processes. For example, the kinds of 'machinic assemblages'
described by Guattari and the political slant of his argument echo the
symbiotic propositions of his compatriot Joël De Rosnay, a computer
scientist and believer in the necessity of the social contract in facing
ecological issues. From the early 1970s onwards De Rosnay develops an
expanded ecology that shows how the development of roads, social systems,
institutions and communication technologies both replicate the interacting
components of natural ecologies, in that they self-regulate through
manifold patterns of feedback, and also influence and are influenced by
them (De Rosnay, 1979). Drawing on cybernetics, De Rosney argues that
ecological equilibrium is an emergent property of the Earth system
maintained by self-regulating adjustments between its parts. Perturberance
to the system (e.g. through human pollution) cause disequilibrium leading
to systemic structural adjustments or modifications to the agitating agent.
Famously, theorized by James Lovelock in his Gaia hypothesis, the Earth's
ecological system adapts itself in prosecution of an overall goal of
maintaining the conditions that give it the best chance of survival;
whether that includes support for the maintenance of human life or not.
(Lovelock, 1988)

Systems theory underpinned the use of the World3 computer model used to
produce the famous, Limits to Growth report to Club of Rome. The model
plotted the interactions between 5 variables: agriculture, industry,
pollution, population and resource depletion concluding that unopposed use
of the Earth's finite resources would inevitably lead to chronic
environmental and social breakdown. (Meadows, et al, 1972) The use of
computers in the Limits to Growth to influence policy represents a
significant moment in any prehistory of a technological art practice
concerned with environmental change. In employing the modeling potential
of cybernetics to account for, map and predict systemic change and
interactions between human and natural systems, it developed wider public
awareness of computers as actors in the unfolding discourses of
environmentalism. To put this another way, the World3 computer did not only
function as an analytical tool, but in its role as dramatis personae
operated as a producer of affect, a teller of stories about the human use
of and relations with the natural environment.

Guattari starts The Three Ecologies with a direct quote from Bateson's
Steps to an Ecology of the Mind citing the older anthropologist's
conceptualization of mental ecologies as important to his project of
conceiving of an eco-practice that transcends disciplinary boundaries.
Bateson's thinking on ecology represents some of the most comprehensive
interdisciplinary attempts to formalize a response to encroaching
environmental change. Like Guattari, he argues that only a renewed
conception of social, ecological and aesthetic relations grounded in acute
awareness of their mutual interdependencies will mitigate the effects of
catastrophic imbalances in ecological systems. In a number of key
publications produced in the final part of his life he produces a rigorous
affect based language that re-imagines how such a shift could occur. A
number of integrative concepts around mind, information and ecology are
developed that are worth rehearsing before going on to explore how his
ideas around aesthetic process can map back to issues raised by this paper.

Bateson argues that the embodied human mind exists in relation to a wider
ecology of sensing 'minds' that are intimately connected and dependent on
each other for structural health. What Bateson describes as mind however,
goes beyond an anthropomorphic conception of the human thinking process or
what is normally understood to be consciousness, and would be inclusive of
any living entity or other system that displays adaptive abilities. This
would include for example, bacteria, cellular systems, the animal kingdom,
humans and their various social, cultural and political structures, the
Earth's ecosystems, atmospheres and oceans; all of which aggregate as an
interacting parts of a larger interconnected ecological system.

Minds are capable of perceiving and responding to each other by exhibiting
an ability to distinguish comparatively between the is/is not, and in the
process adapt to changes in environmental context. The adaptive ability of
minds equates to 'thinking' and is enabled through exchanges of
'information' or encoded signals between systems. Information is the
'medium' through which these processes of thinking flow, Bateson explains:

I include all those lesser exchanges of information and injunction
that occur inside organisms and between organisms and that, in the
aggregate, we call life […] in fact, wherever information – or –
comparison is of the essence of our explanation, there, for me, is
mental process. Information can be defined as a difference that makes
a difference. A sensory end organ is a comparator, a device which
responds to difference. Of course, the sensory end organ is material,
but it is this responsiveness to difference that we shall use to
distinguish its functioning as 'mental'. (Bateson and Bateson, 1988:
17)

Mental activity in the sense meant here can take many different forms, and
is the most significant process operative at all scales of human and
geobiotic life. Bateson lists a number of criteria of mind and information
flow, which show how they co-exist in nested interrelationships. I repeat
them here with examples (Bateson, 2002: 85-86).

A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.


These might include cellular or bacterial formations, larger scale
ecosystems such as the Southern Ocean, and the food chains operative within
it, and social systems such as political parties, all making up what we
would describe as connected environment. Interaction between these systems
occurs via movements of information through the looped arteries that
connect them in a wider patterned schematic or ecology.

Mental processes require circular (or more complex) chains of
determination.

These structures enable information to flow between minds; e.g. electronic
information infrastructure such as the Internet, motorway systems, paired
DNA strands that pass genetic information, the movement of electrical
activity between the axons and dendrites of neural networks, or the
propagation of news through broadcast media organizations.

Interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference.

Receipt of this information 'news of difference' causes state changes in
the system, e.g. a policy change in response to a focus panel, a diminished
bacterial colony in response to antibiotics, an increase in the acid levels
of an ocean in response to carbon saturation, changes in parliamentary
rules in response to corruption scandals.

In mental processes, the effects of difference are to be regarded as
transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events that preceded them.


This 'news of difference' is transmitted in a consistent and recognizable
form so that a system can respond and structurally reconfigure itself in
order to maintain health. These encodings might manifest as a particular
cadence of voice, or tone of enquiry, the sound vibrations caused by
thunder from afar, an increase in climate temperature or an octopus
changing color in response to a nearby predator.

In highlighting the encoding of messaging between nested systems, Bateson
stresses the importance of aesthetics. He does this in two ways: aesthetic
process functions as both a mechanism for raised awareness of ecological
complexity in human terms and a monistic system of geobiotic encoded
messaging passing between minds in the greater ecosystem. That is, Bateson
posits art as not merely a enabling representational device of signs and
metaphors in a semiotic sense, but as a mental system in its own right,
that mirrors and magnifies the greater informational ecologies of which it
is a part (and to which it exchanges information 'news of difference').
Aesthetics then is a participatory process of 'mind' that functions to
recognize the beauty of the patterning of the ecological world as a biotic
process:

A work of art is the outcome of a mental process, like a conch or a
crab or the human body […] every work of art depends on a complexity
of internal relations and can be seen as another in that family of
examples that can be looked at to understand 'the pattern that
connects.' (Bateson and Bateson, 1988: 199)

Bateson's expanded aesthetics then is not a system reserved purely for
human contemplation but an encoded informational exchange in its own right
that helps regulate ecological systems, it is the 'pattern that connects'.
This bravura turn, highlights the function of what Bateson describes as the
aesthetic 'beauty' produced by biological systems. Inherent patterns in
nature (the plumage of a cockerel, the patterning on a crab shell, the
scattering of fungal growth) are not incidental, they are coded functions
designed to elicit response and pass information required to generate and
sustain life. Aesthetics are entwined with and issue forth from biological
patterning and are also a process of recognition that produce in the words
of Bateson's daughter Catherine, 'ways of seeing that affirms our own
complexity and the systemic complexity of the other' (Bateson and Bateson,
1988: 176).

Peering through the theoretical lens provided by Bateson and Guattari we
can see the beginnings of an information aesthetic for climate change.
Bateson, like Guattari, describes an ecology of interactions between
material and immaterial systems of all types. Both writers theorize an
understanding of the function of the mind in ecology and formulate a role
for the arts in focusing attention on the relations between mental states,
behavior and natural ecology. For Bateson the arts enable a re-connection
of human consciousness with the myriad couplings of interacting systems (of
which art is itself a system); a cultural practice that that recognizes the
beauty of the modulating patterns of the ecological world is a prerequisite
for a culture serious about its duties to a healthy environment. Guattari
makes a case for a science and technology dehabituated from a capitalist
project, and an ethical aesthetics within which computational media has a
role as a locus for interdisciplinarity. Neither however are forthcoming in
terms of the specifics of cultural activity that might fulfill these tasks.
However it would not seem inappropriate to propose that a creative
engagement with technologies that map or make visible humanities
interactions with the environment would provide a good fit for the types of
highly connected, ethical and aesthetic praxis imagined and proposed by
both thinkers.

On Practice
In 1996 with my long-term collaborators Gavin Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie
we wrote a manifesto that outlined the parameters of a practice that sought
to explore the aesthetic and interdisciplinary potential offered by network
technologies:

Software and networks are organic matter that should be seen as part
of a continuum with the material world and not separate from it. In
our work we attempt to draw out the 'soft' in software through the use
of biological metaphors […] in order to extend and develop critical
and poetic structures. (Corby, 2005: 110)

The approach we took explored the crossovers between descriptions of
networks as emergent horizontal structures and scientific understandings of
the functioning of biological and ecological components as self-organizing
systems. In a series of projects developed from the mid 1990s onwards we
found ways of combining social activity occurring on networks such as the
Internet, with software models of biological behavior. For example, in 1998
we released Reconnoitre a software project that enabled users to develop
linked spatial structures resulting from specific Internet searches. In
this work, we programmed search term results to take on the visual and
behavioral characteristics of living systems by applying a model of inter-
cellular interaction (electrostatics) to them. This behavioral model
introduced a decay mechanism into displayed search term material which
quivered, waxed, waned and ultimately expired in response to the underlying
biology of the system. In introducing a metaphoric 'death' to the
structures of the Web we linked its technical infrastructure to an all too
human condition; a feature that we hoped would encourage users to develop
'emotional relations' with the work through immersion in its behavioral and
biological 'rhythms'. A number of projects followed employing the same
methodology (Mesh 2001, Gameboy_ultraF_uk 2002, Die_txt 2003) demonstrating
that scientific models of natural phenomena, when recontextualised through
critical art practice, are capable of conveying complex subjective and
sensorial experiences and can operate as an analogues for hidden social
biological and technological processes.

In 2005 as Hurricane Katrina was about to unleash unprecedented social,
psychological and material devastation on New Orleans, we were gathering
data from online satellite tracking sites toward the development of a
project that was to attempt to comment on the interdependencies of global
warming and human behavior. The resultant installation Cyclone.soc (2006),
employed archived satellite data of storm fronts, which were re-worked as
animations and given depth, dimension and interactivity. To the isobars of
these animated pressure fronts we mapped live textual data feeds streamed
from newsgroups and chat rooms debating climate change. Entering the
installation the audience was able to follow these debates, and zoom into
specific conversations using a mouse interface. The swirling storm fronts
carried the exchanges as textual vortices of tension, giving the overall
effect of a conversational churn and eddy of ideological argument and
counter-argument. The work made a direct connection between technology and
environment to show how mediated public discourse operated affectively to
direct understanding toward issues around environmental change. At the time
of writing this dynamic has become more pronounced, i.e. debates around the
data and modeling of climate change have become as visible as the
ecological and social issues forced by the phenomena.

The Southern Ocean Studies
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is the most significant circulation
component of the Antarctic Southern Ocean and is the stretch of water to
which Jack London in Make Westing memorably 'pledged his immortal soul' as
his ship 'ran before a gale of cyclonic fury' (London, 1995). It's
currents are driven by whipping westerly winds that function to buffer
Antarctica's, ice sheets from warm water thus protecting their structural
integrity and ultimately preserving the albedo effect of the region. It
also operates as a huge carbon sink; the Southern Ocean alone absorbs 15%
of the Earth's carbon emissions. Recent research has that has shown that,
carbon saturation of the Southern Ocean caused by climate change and
changes in levels of ozone, have damaged the marine organisms that provide
the mechanisms for it to sequester carbon. Increased acidification caused
by carbon saturation impacts on plankton and visa versa ultimately driving
up ocean temperatures through a causal chain that reinforces already
dangerous rises in ocean temperature. These geochemical processes locally
lead to ice sheet melt, they also impact on the ecological matrix of the
planet writ large, as the ACC operates as a dynamo that interactively feeds
the temperatures of the Earth's oceans with significant global knock-on
affects for global temperature and rainfall distribution (Constable and
Doust: 2009).

In 2009 with Gavin Baily and Jonathan Mackensie, a project was initiated
with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to explore how the data it derives
from its research in the Southern Ocean could be redeployed in public
forms. The project The Southern Ocean Studies builds out from the
conceptual themes achieved in Cyclone.soc, but specifically explores the
phenomena of climate models as vehicles of communication of environmental
change and as emergent cultural phenomena in their own right. This has
involved working with the BAS scientists Nathan Cunningham an expert in
circumpolar data, and Claire Tancell a specialist in the Southern Ocean's
ecosystem, who have given us access to a mixture of models and data sources
from which we have derived the behavioral and ecological character of a
number of installation projects.

[image 2, caption] The Southern Ocean Studies polar projection of westerly
winds and other environmental variables around Antarctica derived from the
OCCAM data set. Photography Sarah Bagshaw.

[image 3] The Southern Ocean Studies, Make Westing horizontal map
projection of westerly winds and other environmental variables around
Antarctica derived from the OCCAM data set. Photography Sarah Bagshaw.

Before proceeding it would be beneficial to both briefly summarize what
climate models are and how we have used them in the project (McGuffie and
Henderson-Sellers: 2005). Models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) employ sophisticated mathematical equations based on
long-standing physical laws that explain how the climate functions, to
which are added a number of other biotic, chemical and physical parameters
based on observational data arising from material science in the field.
These models are used to predict possible changes in climatic conditions by
running hypothesized scenarios which are then checked against the known
climates of the recent and prehistoric past as revealed in the directly
observed (e.g. temperature) and proxy (e.g. ice core) records of these
periods. The models function by calculating how geophysical parameters
interact at a number of intersecting points across the surface of the earth
laid out as a grid of horizontal and vertical sections; the finer the grid,
the greater the resolution and theoretically the more accurate the forecast
of the model. These are then rendered out as 'model maps' in the form of
animations or still images that pictorially represent significant trends,
interactions or patterns in the data.

The models used as the basis for the work described here, use data
parameters specific to the dynamics of the ACC. We take the modeled
mathematical expressions of westerly wind and tidal information and add our
own vector and particle systems to enhance the patterning effect of the
oceans ecological couplings as revealed in the data. We also introduce
additional live data to the work including salinity, temperature and other
ecosystem information such as acidity streamed via sensors from the
Southern Ocean. The project runs in real-time with the geophysical
couplings described in the model meshing with the live data streams to
produce flickering constellations of geobiotic form and intricate lattices
of polar wind. A number of versions of the project exist, some of which
function generatively without user input and others that situate the
audience as integrated elements in the works tidal and geochemical system.
For example, visitor numbers and other installation variables can be
tracked using infrared systems and used to trigger 'tipping points' in the
work. This might involve emphasizing temperature or salinity/acidification
data, or 'mashing' environmental data with the carbon footprint of freight
shipping in the area.

Some thoughts on art and science
The Southern Ocean Studies integrate the audience as agents of change
within a complex system of social and material patterns in a way that is
metaphoric of the human impact on the environment. Like all good models
this work provides a space to prototype new perceptions of climate change
via a sensory embodied engagement with its heterogeneous technologies. In
this respect, our use of climate models diverges from scientific approaches
in that we are concerned with developing a felt sensibility to the
systemness of the patterns produced in ecological interactions, a 'knowing'
derived from affective encounter rather than a cognitive understanding of
phenomena produced through scientific analysis. We do not intend to set
this approach as oppositional to scientific method, there is no hierarchy
of knowing or understanding implied; the stakes are too high. Rather we
hope to show that environmental data can be experienced and understood in
different ways and in doing so contribute models of practice mutually
enrichening for both disciplines.

Summary and discussion
Ecological theories focused on systems, and art practices using
computational media, share an origin myth in cybernetics. This connecting
thread produces one possible route amongst many toward an arts practice
concerned with our changing environment. I propose here that the use of
climate data by artists can innovate forms of practice that direct the
imaging potential of science into aesthetic domains and in so doing,
contribute hybrid, interdisciplinary approaches for the kinds of
transversal aesthetic practices demanded by Guattari. Practitioners who use
digital media are well placed to capitalize on these possibilities as the
information paranaphalia of climate modeling, data collection and
visualization use many of the processes and tools native to the subject
area.

I also argue here, that attempts to broker new subjectivities around
climate change through art practice will need to encourage publics to link
the social and emotional shapes of their lives to the wider material world
of cause and effect. Bateson's 'ecology' is useful as it develops a
sensibility to the patterning emergent from the myriad couplings between
the subcomponents of natural materials, forces and human agency. The
Southern Ocean Studies strives to do this by articulating an aesthetic of
systemness – a metonym for the braided interactions between the ecosphere
and human behavior. This systemness is expressed through real-time image
generation that draws upon and modifies scientific tools and data to render
the ecological complexity of the Southern Ocean as pattern and felt
experience rather than quantity and measure.

By demonstrating the affective, discursive and poetic dimensions of climate
data, this work make arguments for an eco-tec aesthetic, that cuts across
ontological divides to find common cause between the arts and science in
promotion of sensory understanding of environmental complexity. However
this work is not science, it does not attempt to directly prove whether
climate change is happening; we accept the scientific consensus that it is.
Rather it contributes to the epistemologies of media art practice by
emphasizing a subject beyond technological experimentation and produces a
convergence-divergence model of collaboration between the art and science
of climate change which respects differences in approach but which
ultimately shares common purpose.



References

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Acknowledgements
The British Antarctic Survey for scientific and Jonathan Mackenzie and
Gavin Baily for technical input into this paper; Dr Peg Rawes from
University College London for helpful comments; Sarah Bagshaw for her
photography work and Arts Council England, and the Arts and Humanities
Research council for the financial support provided to complete the
research and practice discussed in this chapter.