"Art Science" Participants

ABSTRACT
We live in an era defined by unprecedented quantities of available information (big data) and unprecedented conditions of human induced climate change. le_temps is a multi-channel interactive installation, which renders a large quantity of digital images that depict phenological events in a somatically engaging and interactive way. Phenology the study of recurring biological events in the animal and plant world refers to the timing of these events, the causes of their timing in terms of biotic and abiotic forces and the interrelation among phases of the same or different species. The le_temps project responds to the contemporary geo-informatic space in which we now live. It is an aesthetic exploration of a changing, complex biological system and there response to the Anthropocene and studied through our collective digital secretions. In light of this, we present this work not with a scientific agenda of revealing unknown relationships, although this is indeed possible, but rather with an interest in with what American theorist Benjamin Bratton refers to as the “geophilosophy of data (visualisation)”. Bratton uses this term to critique the project of data visualisation, referring to the plasticity of the process through which data becomes information. le_temps explores what he refers to as “capacity to collect, sort, pattern and display the secretion of world-as-data”. The images presented in this project are aggregated from a range of different networked or distributed sources like The Royal Botanic Gardens – Sydney herbaria, ClimateWatch’s crowd-sourced image database and publicly available image repositories such as Flickr.