The Southern Ocean Studies are part of a series of works, produced with the assistance of the British Antarctic Survey, exploring how climate models can function as representations of climate change beyond their original scientific contexts and purpose, i.e. as art media with expressive, conceptual and critical potential. In doing so the work offers a possible model of practice for a digital and networked art that reflects on the intersections between culture and the technological and cognitive infrastructure of the science of climate change.
The work is a wall-projected, real-time rendering of data derived from a climate model used to track and predict the impacts of climate change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a key circulation component of the Southern Ocean. The data describes the dynamics of surface wind and current velocity, together with values for salinity and acidity derived from Argo floats in the region. To this we have added our own particle systems, to reanimate the data and enhance the patterning effect of the model’s environmental dynamics. The project runs as a live process, producing emergent structure from the interactions between the geophysical couplings described in the model.
The flickering constellations of tidal flow and the intricate lattices of polar wind and ocean current generated by the work embody the hard data of climate change as felt experience. Whilst respecting the underlying science, the work seeks a sensibility to the dynamics of ecological complexity as pattern rather than as quantity and measure — an eco-tec aesthetic that draws out the affective, discursive and poetic dimensions of the data. What we hope to articulate is an aesthetic of system-ness: a metonym for the interconnected forces operative within the ecosphere, to which lived human behaviour contributes and of which it is a part.
The Southern Ocean
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is the most significant circulation component of the Southern Ocean. Its currents are driven by whipping westerly winds that buffer Antarctica’s ice sheets from warm water, protecting their structural integrity and so preserving the albedo effect of the region. It also operates as a huge carbon sink: the Southern Ocean alone absorbs some 15% of the Earth’s carbon emissions. Recent research has shown that carbon saturation of the Southern Ocean — caused by climate change and by changes in levels of ozone — has damaged the marine organisms that provide the mechanisms by which it sequesters carbon. Increased acidification caused by carbon saturation impacts on plankton and vice versa, a causal chain that reinforces rises in ocean temperature already under way.
The project is a collaboration between Tom Corby, Gavin Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie.
