カロリナ・ソアベッカ
Каролина Собечка

cloud machine

source: amateurhuman

In Project Sky+ I develop a personal device for Thinking Like a Cloud. It is sent into the atmosphere attached to a weather balloon. Clouds condense on its mesh wings and flowThe Cloud Machine is a device that embodies contradictions in our relationship to nature and technology brought into focus by geoengineering.

Geoengineering is a field where colorful personalities, preposterous claims, heavy-handed intervention proposals, brilliant engineering and daring thinking mix with subtleties and complexities of natural systems and of the ethical and social implications of the proposed interventions. Dangers of wielding technologies we don’t quite understand come into sharper relief when the costs of technologies continue to drop, and access to information continues to rise. Our perception of individual’s ability, right and responsibility to use technology has changed accordingly. Applications of technology are no longer seen as province of governments and states. Recent resurgence of interest in geo-engineering rises issues concerning not only the soundness of the proposed solutions, but also lack of rules governing such experiments, intellectual property issues and private sector’s involvement.

Geo-engineering has an inherent poetic side: clouds and oceans, storms and floods have long been agents of the ungraspable and intangible beauty of things beyond our understanding, reminder that “a man is a small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonder”, phenomena whose ephemerality escaped the exactitudes of sciences.

The first step in geo-engineering is ‘wringing exactitude from vaporous clouds’, an ancient quest which has yet to be satisfied. Simulation, our new way of knowing, lets us see how close we are to knowing and predicting complex behaviors, and yet how far.

Clouds were not a focus of mainstream physics until the 1960, when Edward Lorenz, mathematician and meteorologist, used a very early computer to develop a mathematical model of weather changing over time. What he found became the base for complexity theory, or chaos theory, a study of dynamical systems that are not predictable. Lorenz’s early computer models were such a revelation that some mathematicians (notably John Von Neumann the developer of that first computer) optimistically proclaimed that the weather control was within reach. However it soon became apparent that these systems was locally unpredictable, though stable over long time.

James Gleick describes in his book “Chaos” how any prediction of weather deteriorates rapidly due to small errors and uncertainties multiplying and cascading through the model:

But suppose the earth could be covered with sensors spaced one foot apart, rising at one foot intervals all the way to the top of the atmosphere. Suppose every sensor gives perfectly accurate readings of temperature, pressure, humidity and any other quantity a meteorologist would want. Precisely at noon an infinitely powerful computer takes all the data and calculates what would happen at each point at 12:01, then 12:02, then 12:03… The computer will still be unable to predict whether Princeton, New Jersey, will have sun or rain on a day one month away. At noon the spaces between sensors will hide fluctuations that the computer will not know about…By 12:01 those fluctuations will already have created small errors one foot away. Soon the errors would have multiplied to the one-foot scale, and so on up to the size of the globe.
In my small experiment the condensation of moisture into a cloud also cannot be predicted: the forecast of the formation of the cloud is entirely a matter of speculation. Time Dye created used this formula for calculating how much water would need to be added to the atmosphere to create a cloud. The formula is dependent on the atmospheric conditions at the time and place of dispersion of the cloud mixture, humidity, dew point and temperature.

The crux of geo-engineering is inventing a device to intervene in the natural process, harnessing its materials and dynamics.

Climate-engineering ideas allow us a peek at how the fundamental human relationship to nature is being altered, how our attitudes change reflecting trends in culture, sciences and policy. My project attempts to capture part of this emerging narrative by tracing the language and assumptions implied in the documents when applying for weather modification permits, providing weather modification services to general public and otherwise engaging existing structures for dialogue.

I’m also interested in the individual’s place in the environmental crisis, and the private and group ethics at play. Geo-engineering is often seen as a last-resort ‘fix’, when all else fails, but efforts to mitigate carbon emissions have not gotten us very far, and the danger is that with a geo-engineering technique at hand, the efforts at mitigation would be even less successful. So what is keeping us on the path to this last resort? Can we do some human-engineering to steer ourselves down a path of conservation? I’m interested in psychology of our behaviors in this realm.
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source: v2nl

Karolina Sobecka works with animation, design, interactivity, computer games and other media and formats. Her artwork often engages public space and explores the way we interact with the world we create and imagine. It often takes forms of interactive installations, urban interventions or design objects. It has been shown internationally, including at the V&A, MOMA, Beall Center for Art + Technology and ISEA, and has received several awards, including from Creative Capital, Rhizome, NYFA, Princess Grace Foundation, Vida Art and Artificial Life Awards and Japan Media Arts Festival.