In 2009 we began a project with the British Antarctic Survey to explore how the data it derives from its research in the Southern Ocean could be redeployed in public forms. The project builds out from the conceptual themes achieved in our previous work Cyclone.soc, but specifically explores the phenomena of climate models as vehicles of communication of environmental change and as emergent cultural phenomena in their own right.

The Southern Ocean Studies are part of a series of projects which aims to explore how Climate Models can function as representations of climate change beyond their original scientific contexts and purpose, i.e. as art media with expressive, conceptual and critical potential.   The climate models used as the basis for the work described here, use data parameters specific to the dynamics of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which is a major component of the Southern Ocean. We take the model’s mathematical expressions of westerly wind and tidal information and add our own vector and particle systems, to enhance the patterning effect of the systems ecological couplings. We also introduce additional live data to the work including salinity, temperature and other ecosystem information such as acidity streamed via sensors from Southern Ocean. The project runs in real-time with the geophysical couplings described in the model meshing with the live data streams to produce flickering constellations of tidal flow, wind direction and geobiotic form.

Whilst respecting the underlying science, the work seeks to develop a sensibility to the dynamics of ecological complexity as pattern and felt experience rather than quantity and measure. In doing so we hope to articulate an aesthetic of system-ness – a metonym for the interconnected forces operative within ecosphere to which lived human behavior contributes and is a part.

Many thanks to Nathan Cunningham and Claire Tancell from the British Antarctic Survey.

Gavin Baily, Tom Corby, Jonathan Mackenzie.