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CO2 Edenburgh: Can Art Change the Climate?
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Spirit in the Air integrate art, technology and science to explore ground level CO2 during the Edinburgh Festival. Where science uses technology to establish matters of fact, artists are working with technology leaders from the Scottish busines community to convene technology and expertise around the public perception of carbon dioxide. CO2 or as the artists prefer to call it the ‘hot air’ that is produced by everyday transport conditions and simple breathing indoors while attending the social events related to the festival. Just beneath this creative inquiry lies a fundamental question about trees as consumers of CO2 and as an aesthetic ally in the battle to curb the effect of hot air in cities.
The milestone of 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in our atmosphere was breached this past May (2013) at the long term environmental monitoring station at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Calibrating the project with a live data-feed from the projects own ‘Mauna Loa’ like networked observatory at Arthur’s Seat, the exhibition will result in a real time exposition, a series of mediated art science discussions and a public record of CO2 conditions captured during the Edinburgh festival
The Spirit team includes-artists, activists, curators, directors technologists, performers and programmers working with Spirit assistants to engage air quality conditions along congested roadways, busy winding streets, pocket parks like the Geddes Garden on Westport Street and grand parks like the Princes Street Gardens. The Spirit team will work to ‘see and feel’ source and flow, we hope to be able to sense the buffering capacity of nature and the inter-relationships between people, technology and other living things. The exhibition will explore what it means to interpret, to reveal, to interact and potentially to intervene through a marriage of scientific positivism and subjective creativity.
Spirit team ‘carbon catchers’ will attend the pressing social conditions of art, performing arts, comedy and political events that are run during the festival where human-to-human exchange, expression and interaction create clouds of CO2 in enclosed spaces. This project intends to initiate a discussion about carbon exchange during the festival; asking about the real carbon costs of an international festival but also asking about the role of critical art practices in imagining different paths through our collective climate future.