Still decompressing post-seminar, but thinking through my critique feedback, what I can do next, and some of the points of interest I've been exploring recently...

I've been continuing with photogrammetry studies and investigating the volcanic rock walls and structures around Auckland, both as overall structures in space but also as individual beings in isolation from larger structure. This is part was inspired by Maraea Timutimu's whenua portraits as well as NASA's images of distant comets, planets and asteroids. I'm curious about how these latter material objects are viewed over such a distance and the resulting paradoxically close image, and how we bridge that gap both visually and conceptually between ourselves and these entities through that process.
The way the walls around my neighbourhood are built varies a lot - some are built with mortar between each stone, creating an almost scale-like pattern in contrasts the volcanic rock. Some of the modern houses in the area have used volcanic rock from other volcanic quarries to build neat garden walls as inspired by their historic neighbours. And others are simply mindfully stacked piles of stone, either in the process of being remodelled themselves, moved from one side of a driveway to another, or being strategically built around so as not to disturb them, with no mortar or supports to hold them in place beyond their own gravity and friction. I've been enjoying exploring the final kind of wall the most recently as I recently discovered that I can pick up and move around the top layer of stone myself... There's something really amusing and bizarre about being able to pick up and move a volcano around itself, within itself, beyond itself, adjacent to itself, etc., and I have a small growing pet rock collection on my doorstep (which I intend on putting back where I found them eventually). 'Pet rock' is somewhat literal, as although many of the rocks appear dull and dry from a distance, many have lichens, mosses and other tiny plants or plant-like forms growing in their pores, which still require moisture and sunlight to survive. I've already confused a few insects by removing them from the walls (and one befuddled neighbour who probably thinks I'm a bit weird by now), and I don't want to disrupt what's happening in their ecosystem too much beyond what is minimally necessary. (I also try not to move things around too much if there are well-established entities on or around the loose rocks for the same reason). I'm not entirely sure what the politics of this action is yet, but it's fun to think through, and it's serving as both a research practice and a thought catalyst at the moment...
How much life resides in a stone, and how much of a mountain remains in a wall?

I wrote about concretions, particularly focusing on deep sea concretions (aka nodules), some weeks ago and having discovered this personal earth-moving rock collecting process, I'm feeling drawn back to them. The idea of metallurgic, geological deep-sea entity that begun with a post-living "core" (fossilised bones or shark teeth etc.) and grows over time, to then go on to form an environment for living things on the ocean floor - one of the least studied and most fragile given how long they take to stabilise and form. it has a nice parallel with the rock walls. As the potential environmental effects of deep sea mining are a growing concern in an age where industry demands for rare metals is ever growing, I can't help thinking about how the concretions are viewed by industry as entities for human consumption rather than part of wider, often incredibly fragile systems; as well as the way non-living entities are viewed overall in a globalised, capitalism-driven world...
(Something about the relationship or
conceptualisation of interior vs. exterior in terms of value in relation to both geological entities and the concretion nodules also makes me think a little of museum displays and other forms of display that involve elevating an object's perceived status or importance. The concretions are valued for their layered rare metal exteriors... I'm curious about the relationship between display case vs. interior objects, and this throws the usual balance out a bit in an unexpected way...)
Interesting articles and happenings
Interview with Botanist Stefano Mancuso: ‘You can anaesthetise all plants. This is extremely fascinating"
Mancuso is a pioneer in the plant neurobiology movement, which seeks to understand “how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion”
feels relevant to the concept of non-human agency and intelligence and the theme of ecological interdependence I'm looking at. There are some nice parallels between Mancuso's work and the book Carnal Knowledge by Jondi Keane, which discusses the idea of embodied knowledge and consciousness
"I started to think that almost all the claims I was hearing about the brain were valid also in plants. The neuron is not a miracle cell, it’s a normal cell that is able to produce an electrical signal. In plants, almost every cell is able to do that. The main difference between animals and plants, in my opinion, is that animals concentrate specific functions inside organs. In the case of plants, they diffuse everything through the whole body, including intelligence... Plants are so incredibly cooperative with one another because cooperation is the most efficient way to grant the survival of species. Not understanding the strength of the community is one of [humanity’s] main errors. There was a very clever evolutionary biologist at the beginning of the last century, Peter Kropotkin, who said that when there are fewer resources, and the environment is changing, then cooperation is vastly more efficient [than competition]. This is an important teaching for us today, because we are entering a period of reduction of resources and the environment is changing because of global warming...
[If you had a spectrum with rocks at one end and humans at the other] I would say [plants are] very close to humans. Communication means you are able to emit a message and there is something able to receive it, and in this sense plants are great communicators. If you are unable to move, if you are rooted, it’s of paramount importance for you to communicate a lot. We experienced this during lockdown, when we were stuck at home and there was an incredible increase in traffic on the internet. Plants are obliged to communicate a lot, and they use different systems. The most important is through volatiles, or chemicals that are emitted in the atmosphere and received by other plants. It’s an extremely sophisticated form of communication, a kind of vocabulary. Every single molecule means something, and they mix very different molecules to send a specific message...
It’s incredibly difficult to talk about consciousness, first because we actually don’t know what consciousness is, even in our case. But there is an approach to talking about it as a real biological feature: consciousness is something that we all have, except when we are sleeping very deeply or when we are under anaesthesia. My approach to studying consciousness in plants was similar. I started by seeing if they were sensitive to anaesthetics and found that you can anaesthetise all plants by using the same anaesthetics that work in humans. This is extremely fascinating. We were thinking that consciousness was something related to the brain, but I think that both consciousness and intelligence are more embodied, relating to the entire body."
The Launch of a super-pressure monitoring balloon by NASA in Wanaka
The balloon, one of several planned to launch in the near future, will be aloft for 100 days or more with its flight path controlled by the wind speed and direction at altitude. Real-time tracking of these flights is publicly available online.
While validating the super pressure balloon technology is the main flight objective, the balloon is also carrying the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), from Princeton University, which uses a wide field of view to image large galaxy clusters from a balloon platform in a near-space environment. By measuring the way these massive objects warp the space around them, also called “weak gravitational lensing,” SuperBIT will be able to map the dark matter present in these clusters.... A second SPB flight is planned and will fly the Extreme Universe Space Observatory 2 (EUSO-2), a mission from the University of Chicago that aims to build on data collected during a 2017 mission. EUSO-2 will detect ultra-high energy cosmic-ray particles from beyond our galaxy as they penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. The origins of these particles are not well known, so the data collected from EUSO-2 will help solve this science mystery.... Most standard heavy-lift zero pressure balloons can vary in altitudes as much as 45,000 feet (13.7 km) due to the alternating warming and cooling of the day-night cycle. In response, mission operators typically release excess weight in the form of ballast to maintain altitude. The SPB, in contrast, is designed to maintain a positive internal pressure and shape irrespective of its environment, which keeps the balloon at a stable float altitude without dropping ballast.
I'm not particularly interested in weather balloons, but have been following various NASA space happenings for a while now; Both the balloon's telescope and its journey is fascinating - I love how its journey and time afloat isn't completely fixed, dependent on the temperature and wind direction. The video above was initially a live stream from a camera attached to the balloon's monitoring equipment - while it is thousands of metres above the ground and in constant motion, it appeared incredibly still, with changes in its ropes and shape only noticeable over the course of hours. This and the work that Sonya shared in her artist talk last week remind me that video doesn't need to follow a normative viewing time - it can drift over many hours, days even...
Other media I've been engaging with recently
In my downtime, I've been watching a lot of folk horror and sci-fi films - they're just some favourite genres, but many of the folk horror films (Hagazussa, The Curse of Aubrey Ernshaw, The Wind) are structured in chapters, which has been helpful from an exhibition consideration standpoint - thinking about how different works can tell both their own stories, but also connect into a larger ongoing narrative, that relates to other even broader narratives... On Hagazussa (2017), film critic Noel Murray writes "the movie’s chapters are like four short films... Hagazussa is like a series of beguiling paintings and photographs from an old history book, each suggesting something inexplicable, which the viewer has to puzzle out, since the subjects are long dead." Not saying my work can or will do that, but still! Am trying to consider how narratives can be built...
Natasha from the MFA cohort recently told me about the website The Canary & The Hammer: The Gold Depository by photographer Lisa Barnard. I love the way the site flows between journalistic or documentary style information-sharing and visual art, combining web design, music, video, photography and text to tell the story. The About page is imaged below:

From NZ Geo
On the changing of New Zealand's glaciers and their ecosystems in the face of global warming, and the cyclical nature of water through different abiotic systems
Retreating glaciers and thinning snow and ice are the future of New Zealand’s mountains. Climate change is predicted to warm the country’s atmosphere by 1–4°C by the end of the century, altering the natural water cycle—how much is frozen as snow, how much falls as rain, and how much flows in rivers. Climate researchers are seeking to predict what will change, and when. What will be the impact on hydroelectric power stations and irrigation schemes? Which areas will be hit hardest by flooding, or increasingly severe drought?
"The Big Blue Banquet" - on ocean communities and multi-/inter-species interaction, and the work of New Zealand's ocean scientists
I found the video above really curious (visually it reminded me of an experiment I did last year that involved overlaying tracking markers on bits of debris in footage of the water at Orakei Basin...). The text element, to me, adds a lot of complexity to the footage (the article has examples of it without the overlay, which feels much calmer despite the busyness going on). The video is created by marine scientist Wednesday Davis, who analysed drone footage of the Hauraki Gulf and used AI programming to identify each animal on and below the surface.
“Rather than someone having to sit through hours of footage and count the birds, we’ve trained a computer to do that by itself,” she says. To train it, though, Davis did have to sift through 14 hours of footage collected on 51 separate drone flights. For each frame of interest—some of which contained as many as 80 animals—she digitally drew a rectangle around each creature and told the computer, for example, that “‘within this little box is a gannet, and it’s flying,’” she says. “I had to do this 166,000 times.” She also altered the images to give the AI more practice: flipping them, changing the colour and the contrast and the resolution. “If you only show it very beautiful pictures of dolphins, it won’t detect them on a messy day, or when there’s a cloud or some sparkles on the water.” Now, when footage of work-ups is run through the program, the computer can recognise—with 93 per cent accuracy—which clusters of pixels represent which species, and whether they’re flying, swimming, sitting or diving. The data is open source, Davis says, meaning gannet or shearwater researchers elsewhere in world can use it. The scientists also hope to collaborate with others to teach the AI to recognise other species—less common seabirds, say, or sharks. “It’s not just Wednesday’s Hauraki Gulf project,” Davis says. “We can share it with others.”
Unrelated, but I always love the "rock scene" from Everything, Everywhere, All At Once :)
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