Context Statement - Installation

Healer-1 makes use of modulation, channeling a holistic way of thinking about sustainability. During our process, we were conscious of the duality in the way humans reap the planet’s resources and tried to emulate that in the way we constructed the artefact. The prominent egg-like shape of the piece, manifests as a catalyst for an array of symbolism on it’s own. The egg represents a looming birth, a chance for new beginnings or ideas that either continue or disrupt the forces at play. (Artdependence, n.d.)

The use of compact-discs as the basic units that lay the foundations for the egg, was directly inspired by the format of the Geodesic Dome, an approach popularised by Buckminster Fuller for it’s modular yet sturdy design. (Fuller, 2008) The material itself harks to the distorted systems for consumption that prevail in our modern society. In our eternal quest for speed and convenience, humanity has taken something innately abstract such as music and other forms of entertainment media, which we all enjoy and place great value on, and subsequently stored them into unsustainable formats that require vast amounts of resources, all because of our salacity to monetise those art forms, especially in the last few decades. And although the schematics for acquiring various media have changed, the effects of the demand and supply chain that defined the previous generations have had lasting impact on the environment, something we now consider as the focal agent of the Anthropocene. (Carrington, 2016)

It can be argued that depending on the contents, each single compact disc on its own, is essentially an obsolete artefact in today’s exponentially accelerated technological race, but if they were collected and used en masse and repurposed, their capacity could be redefined to form various assortments that could lead us to unexpected and invigorating places in the future, all the while allowing for our shared environment and resources to flourish. The idea is that we could and should apply these to future manufacturing processes that involve mining for raw materials.

This is the advent of an approach that we need to inherit now, in all our design methodologies, to put an end to the cycle of squandering, or at least curb the pending hazards we impose on the environment, by changing the way we think about materials and where they end up after their original purpose have been fulfilled.

If we are already aware that there is now nine billion tonnes of plastic waste materials, floating around our oceans, drifting through our rivers and streams, or ending up as landfill, it seems abominable not to be repurposing or transitioning them into more innovative and less harmful schemes. (Geyer, Jambeck, & Law, 2017) It should be a priority for us to reprocess those materials to create homes for the homeless for example, rather than destroying the habitats of the creatures that play a vital role in our ecosystems. The icons of egg and nest ubiquitously represent a sanctuary and abode for many creatures, and in our piece we tried to capture that fragility and evanescence of these motifs.

We’ve attempted to mimic the naturally ecological methods already possessed by animals, in terms of using found objects that are readily available in their environment, in this case, instead of disposing the cut-offs we used for building the egg structure, we’ve recycled them to create a mesh-base for the nest. Mixing the two contrasting materials of wood and plastic relays back to the idea of how our collective actions on waste have the potential of affecting the process or instinctive behaviour displayed by the other species that share the planet with us, a great example would be the living patterns of oceanic birds which have been negatively disrupted by The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the result of our short-sightedness and neglect. (Miller, Son, Strickling, & Wu, 2016)

We took advantage of the reflectiveness of the materials against a spectrum of light, to produce the ethereal effect of the overall piece- it evokes the emotions one would feel when witnessing the Aurora Borealis, a phenomenon which overlooks a melting landscape in the arctic that is gradually being dismantled by the growing amount of carbon in the atmosphere. (“New Stories,” 2013)

The soundscapes that we feature in the piece were created by taking ambient samples of the various social and ecological issues we are faced with. They amplify the cries of elephants being poached and whales deafened by seismic blasting, as well as the grinding sounds of an industrial factory and the hum of a nuclear reactor. (Ketten, Lien, & Todd, 1993)

The floating disc above the egg, symbolises a kind of divinatory mirror to the way we operate as a society, and how that in turn affects the mechanics of the environment resulting in extreme shifts in the climate, it allows us to reflect on them by providing a magnified visual insight into how our ecology could potentially culminate, be it as a purgatorial wasteland of black-tar, singed in hellfire, or frozen in ice, these images become intertwined in the course of our speculated relationship with nature, and they are brought to our focus with every push of a button.

Healer-1 was intended as an antecedent to similar artefacts in the future. They would ideally be exhibited at a festival event, that challenges people to materialise such concepts to raise awareness about social issues in their communities. We want to be able to continue a productive dialogue on sustainability, that sees people converging art, music and technology in bold and unconventional ways.

References

Artdependence. (n.d.). ArtDependence | Symbolism in Art: The Egg. Retrieved June 17, 2018, from https://www.artdependence.com/articles/symbolism-in-art-the-egg/

Carrington, D. (2016, August 29). The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age. Retrieved April 19, 2018, from https://goo.gl/DSZFLo

Fuller, R. B. (2008). Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R., & Law, K. L. (2017). Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made. Science Advances, 3(7), e1700782. https://goo.gl/qjp9i4

Ketten, D. R., Lien, J., & Todd, S. (1993). Blast injury in humpback whale ears: Evidence and implications. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94(3), 1849– 1850. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.407688

Miller, K., Son, J., Strickling, M., & Wu, S. (2016). Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Introduction to Public Health Posters. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/X6JwCX

New Stories: Aurora Borealis and the Melting Tundra. (2013, August 5). Retrieved June 17, 2018, from https://goo.gl/b3TmPo