First commissioned in 2012, Natalie Jeremijenko’s Mussel Choir is a monitoring system turned art piece that utilizes live mussels as biosensors to project changes in water quality. Each mussel within one of Jeremijenko’s thirty bivalve condominiums (aka concrete slabs that the mollusk communities inhabit) is outfitted with a Hall effect sensor, which uses artificial intelligence to assign a musical note to individual movement as the mussels filter out pollutants from their surrounding environment. The final output is a song, composed by the choir of mussels themselves; the “choir” has performed in Venice, Melbourne, and New York City. By enhancing the natural intelligence of the mussels, Jeremijenko’s work allows viewers to rethink the ways in which they connect and sense their own surroundings, helping highlight the greater intelligence humankind and non-human nature possesses in responding to environmental harms. ‘Mussel Choir’ also serves as an example of innovative coastal urban architecture, integrating digital technologies with the natural ecosystem and landscape. While ‘Mussel Choir’ does allow for deeper reflection on the part of the individual viewer, questions surrounding the ethical implications of utilizing sentient beings in anthropogenic projects remain. Despite such moral quandaries, the degree of sentience of the mussels as a species is still up for debate, so ‘Mussel Choir’ does not seem to merit such critique.
What if we could translate other species’ languages to co-create our future world? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://creative-states.org/explore/what-if-we-could-translate-other-species-languages-to-co-create-our-future-world/
Academic Reference: Heartney, E. (2014). Art for the Anthropocene Era. Art in America, 6.
Categories
Aesthetic/Leisure, Biodiversity, Ecological Monitoring, Monitoring, Pollution, Psychology
Air Pollution Robot
The dangers of air pollution to human health are well documented, though the traditional methodology of collecting and reporting on sample lags behind the need to keep abreast and regulate air pollution in a meaningful amount of time. The use of drones and robots have been identified by researchers as resources that can be tweaked […]
Artificial Life, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Industry/Natural Commodities, Lifestyle, Monitoring
Telematic Rivers
Erica Kermani’s artwork seeks to answer a central question: if rivers were seeing an equal, living entity, would humans take issues like climate change threatening them more seriously? In his year-long art exhibition in 2017, Kermani, in collaboration with Diana Salcedo & Jeana Chesnik, created a new forum of interaction between humans and rivers to […]
Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies
Co-occupied Boundaries
Art is easily found in nature but rarely is what considered art today inherently natural. The concept of co-occupied mediums that serve to be both functional for nature and aesthetically pleasing to people is being actively explored by Asya Ilgun and Phil Ayres, from the CITAstudio at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In […]
Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies