Blog week 13

Sensing Practices

Program Earth chapter 4 notes

Jennifer Gabrys highlights her time spent with the Environmental Computing group during an experimental research residency at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Lapland, a long standing environmental monitoring station and part of many environmental monitoring networks. At the station they monitor many things such as weather and Arctic lake ecology.

She explains that as the station is in the arctic, the effects of climate change are very pronounced, and therefore of interest to monitor. As well as empirical data of climate change collected from the environment, humans and nonhumans also have lived experiences of the effects.

I was interested in the distinction she pointed out of artistic data gathering tending to focus on phenemonlogical aspects of climate change rather than empirical data for scientific use — “many artists’ experiments might focus more on the phenomenal or sensory aspects of data gathering, such as capturing the sound and light of that same lake within discrete moments… What counts as data in scientific and creative practice differs, as do the motivations for the collection and use of data.” I think this experiential data can better represent the reality of climate change effects in ways that we can actually sense.

She sets out to answer the following questions:

“How do we tune into climate change through sensing and monitoring practices? What are the particular entities that are in-formed and sensed? How do the differing monitoring practices of arts and sciences provide distinct engagements with the experiences of measurement and data? And what role do more-than-humans have in expressing and registering the ongoing and often indirect effects of climate change, such that categories and practices of “citizenship” and citizen sensing might even be reconstituted?”

Gabrys’ more inclusive interpretation of citizenship extending from the humans to also non-human entities is an interesting area of focus, as it allows one to look at the experience of non-humans with equal importance and consider the repercussions of our actions not only on them, but also to consider the effects on us through their examples. She explains that different non-humans can be observed to sense environmental shifts, for example “indicator species” such as lichens and mosses — “Organisms may be studied as proxies of environmental processes, yet they are not parsing single variables as much as living with changes in complex environments over time”

Gabrys, J (2016) Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/gabrys_pdf