1.5 DEGREES OF CONCERN
1.5 Degrees of Concern is an international collaborative installation by artists Kristine Diekman (US), Lisa Mansfield (AUS) and Liz Waugh McManus (UK). The installation networks conversations between three women on separate continents who are living through global climate crises. The stories, both historical and speculative, span 200 years and represent a dissolving past, an urgent present, and an imagined future. Examining the layered transmissions and abandoned traces, we invite you to consider possibilities for an alternative utopian future and first steps to building it.The artwork invites listeners to interact with the objects. Touching, hovering over and exploring provides a multi-sensory experience that brings the listener into the complex narrative world of sounds, provides a mode of reflection and ultimately connects them to the urgency of climate crisis.
THE TABLETOP
Gathered on the tabletop are objects and interfaces that the writers and survivors collected to tell their stories. Cyanotype glass plates and specimen slides capture the ghosts of samphire, a wetlands salt tolerant plant essential in ecosystems that are at risk of erosion due to flooding. Glass casts of samphire are held in handblown enclosures and dotted throughout a book, allowing for further study of the specimens. Books placed across the table convey the stories, wisdom, wonder, voices, struggles and hopes of those who survived disasters, are struggling to overcome life-threatening conditions, and tune themselves to the hum of a future devoid landscape. Rocks are scattered across the table, including fossilized honeycomb coral from 252 million years ago. The books hold speakers and conductive materials such as carbon and copper. The speakers on the back wall rise in the graph of predicted global warming. The only living object on the table is a maiden hair fern, one of the planets oldest extant plants, and functions as a hopeful reminder. On a wall near the table is a modified transistor radio. Moving your hand over and near the antennae fashioned from a carbonize stick tunes a pirate radio broadcast for the recipe for water.THE HACKED BOOKS
The artwork is anchored by three modified or hacked books that incorporate electronics, interactive audio narratives and tactile sensors. Visitors access the stories by exploring tactile interfaces that trigger the sounds through proximity, touch and carbon wands. They are the relics of information that carry the stories of loss and survival. The book's stories can be read by clicking on the images below.
