As an artist working across media, I have used everything from text to my voice to poetically translate and express information. Lately I’ve been working with another tool, geological datasets.
While scientists use data visualization to show the results of a dataset in interesting and informative ways, my goal as an artist is a little different. In the studio, I treat geological data as another material and use them to guide my interactions with Mylar film, knitting patterns or opera. In my work, data operates in a meaningful and abstract way.
Two of my projects in particular, “breaking points” and “tidal arias”, exemplify this style of work. My goal in these pieces is to offer people new ways to personally engage with the vast scale of geological time.
Breakpoints
One of the first projects where I tackled data as a tool was my letterpress series “breakpoints”. In this series, I coded data from cryoseismic or icequake events to create mesh models.
Working with icequake data was a continuation of my research on what I call “archived landscapes.” These are places that have had many different geological identities over time, such as mountains that were once marine reefs.
Since knit fabrics are made up of many individual stitches, I can use them to code individual data points. In a knitting pattern or chart, each type of stitch is represented by a specific symbol. To write the patterns for this project, I used the open source program Stitch Maps, converting the peaks and valleys of the seismographs into individual stitch symbols.
Knitting diagrams often display these symbols in a grid. Instead, Stitch Maps allows them to fall as they do when knitted, so the graphic mimics the shape of the final fabric.
I was intrigued by the expressive possibilities of this feature and how the software allowed me to experiment. I was only able to write patterns that worked in theory and not as physical, handmade structures. This gave me more freedom to design patterns that fully expressed datasets without having to guarantee their viability as a textile.
Glaciers form gradually as new snowfall compresses previous snow layers and crystallizes them into ice. It piles up in layers in rows of interlocking loops, similar to a knitted fabric. Each structure appears stable but can easily dissolve.
Ice earthquakes occur as a result of calving events or accumulation of meltwater in glaciers. Like glaciers melting, the weave is always in danger of disintegrating; But instead of melting, it gets stuck and dissolves, heading towards formlessness. These structural similarities between glaciers and knitting are also reflected in the pressures of “breaking points” where devastating ice earthquakes create patterns that cannot be knitted.
Loop
Repeating, interlocking loops are the basic units that make up the structure of a knitted textile. The cycle also forms the seed of an ongoing study that I pursue during my artist-in-residence program at the NASA GEODES research group. In August 2023, I joined the research team in Flagstaff, Arizona. While I helped collect data from sites in the San Francisco volcanic field, I also conducted my own fieldwork: photography, drawing, note-taking, and walking.
One of my hikes was a hike around a particularly prominent geological loop (the rim of the SP cinder cone volcano). This is the second crater walk I have completed; the first traces the subsurface edge of the Decorah impact structure in Iowa.
I see my paths in these landscapes as stands for yarn. Over time, I will create a textile by taking walks that follow craters or geological cycles. The performance of something as familiar as textiles offers me a new way to think about something much more difficult to grasp: geological time.
This article is part of Art and Science ClashA series examining the intersections between art and science.
You may be interested in:
Literature inspired my medical career: Why are the humanities needed in healthcare?
I wrote a play for kids about integrating art with STEM fields – here’s what I learned about interdisciplinary thinking
Art and science intertwined: This course explores the long and interrelated history of two ways of seeing the world
Performance and ebbs and flows
Performance has been a useful tool in my work as it can help people understand and relate to geological processes.
The field of geology emerged from a long history of extractive and colonial enterprise. In this context, land is valued for its economic importance as raw materials to be extracted or territory to be claimed. In my performances, I aim to interact with geology not as a consumable resource but as its own active entity.
In recent years, I composed and performed two arias from tidal data.
The first of these, the “Marseille tide gauge aria”, sourced 130 years of sea level data collected from a tide gauge in the Gulf of Marseille, France. I converted each annual average sea level into a separate note within my vocal range. This resulted in a composition that expresses the rising sea levels of the bay as increasingly higher pitches in the aria.
The lyrics come from a somber poem in Rasu-Yong Tugen’s book “Songs of the Black Moon”. Each note of the aria conveys not only the measured sea level but also my emotional response to this data set.
Last fall, the “Marseille tide gauge aria” was transmitted into the ionosphere, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. This was done as part of artist Amanda Dawn Christie’s “Ghosts in the Air Glow” project using the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program’s ionospheric survey instrument, an array of 180 antennas that emit high-frequency radio waves.
The transmission of the aria was reflected from the ionosphere to Earth and to shortwave radio listeners around the world.
For the second of these vocal pieces, “skagway tide aria,” I used estimated and recorded tide data from Skagway, Alaska. With this data, I created an aria for the 2051 Munich Climate Conference, where speakers presented from the perspective of a world with a changing climate 30 years in the future.
I was attracted to this particular dataset because falling tide levels in Skagway appear to contradict the global trend of rising sea levels. However, this is a temporary effect where melting glaciers release pressure on the land, causing water levels to rise faster. The impact will diminish over the next half century and Skagway’s tides will begin to rise again.
Over the next few months, I will be working with geophysical datasets collected during the NASA GEODES field trip to write new arias. I want these pieces to continue to blur the distinction between the human and the geological, inviting listeners to think more deeply about their own relationship with the lands they use and occupy.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
Written by Sarah Nance Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Read more:
The author’s projects with GEODES and Ghosts in the Air Glow were supported by the financing of these organizations.