Fragments: 30.2051 N, 90.1121
The two artists collaborating on this piece, Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders, both have family ties to the deep South in the U.S., and have begun working on a longer research project into that geographical area. As part of that project, the two have created a special dataset of the Bald Cypress, a type of tree found on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. These trees are able to live for thousands of years, but at present are threatened by climate change. Their crucial role in stopping coastal erosion in the area lies in question, moreso with the surge in hurricanes happening every year. The artists have used this dataset to train a GAN to reflect on what these areas might be like in the future, with and without the trees. The moving image is generated with this model and is controlled by some of the weather data generated by the most recent hurricane in the area, Hurricane Ida.
Process and Research
This NFT was created for Faces of Water, an online exhibition curated by Luba Elliott for Feral File, which brought together artists who have been working with machine learning for many years, using water as a shared conceptual lens. The production of the work coincided with Hurricane Ida, which at the time was the second most destructive hurricane to make landfall in Louisiana after Katrina. Caroline was in the United States at the time (the field recordings of the storm included in the metadata were made by her) and given the exhibition's focus on environmental systems and the costs and impacts of technological infrastructures, it was important that any proceeds from the sale of the token were redirected back into the affected community. The stuttering quality of the animation is intentional and, to my mind at least, recalls the rhythm of breathing, as the branches slowly appear and fade from view. The connection between trees and breathing is indirect, but it is there (oxygen exchange and interdependence) and the work gently connects the two.
Exhibition Venues
References and Inspiration
Dissemination
This project was originally minted as an edition of 88 on the Bitmark blockchain. Some collectors migrated it to Ethereum when Feral File offered a Bitmark -> Ethereum bridge. However, the artist's preference was for these artworks to live on the Tezos blockchain: https://tzkt.io/KT1Q3GCiWndMUWBjeUt12crnDFF9PFohhfmZ/operations/. All proceeds from the initial sale were donated to the Hurricane Ida Relief & Recovery Fund who are distribute funds across NOLA. Inside the metadata for the piece the collector also received one photograph from the training set, a short audio clip of a field recording of Hurricane Ida and hand-drawn maps and notes planning the research and fieldwork.