[spectre] Turbulence Commission: "Eclipse" by EcoArtTech

[Turbulence]

March 9, 2009
Turbulence Commission: "Eclipse" by EcoArtTech
http://turbulence.org/works/eclipse

"Eclipse" is a user driven, networked-art application that alters and
corrupts United States national and state park images from Flickr.com based
on the real-time Air Quality Index (particle pollution data) provided by the
United States Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) at the site
www.airnow.gov.

"We visit national parks to get away from traffic and smog. But the latter
can be hard to shake, even in remote, pristine-seeming places. "Eclipse", an
open-source program created by Cary Peppermint and Leila Christine Nadir of
EcoArtTech, will make air pollution's presence visually -- and viscerally --
explicit." Anna Lena Phillips, American Scientist

"Eclipse" is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka
Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding
from the Murray G. and Beatrice H. Sherman Charitable Trust.

BIOGRAPHIES

EcoArtTech is Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. They have been working
together informally since 1996 and began exhibiting together in 2004. In
2005, they founded EcoArtTech as their collaborative platform for digital
environmental art.

LEILA CHRISTINE NADIR recently completed her doctoral studies in English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University and regularly gives talks on
environmental ethics, art, and literature at international conferences and
universities. She has taught at Columbia, Oneonta State College, and Colgate
University, including courses on American literature, modernity and
modernism, and new media art history and theory. In 2008, the Society for
Utopian Studies awarded her the annual Arthur O. Lewis for the best paper by
a young scholar. In addition to EcoArtTech, her current projects include
writing a memoir on growing up Afghan and Muslim in the United States and
reworking her dissertation into a book titled "Sacrifice and its
Discontents: Ethical Paradox in Twentieth-Century Environmental Writing and
Art."

CARY PEPPERMINT is a conceptual and performance artist working with digital
technologies and "natural" environments. Cary is known for his website
"Restlessculture.net," an internationallly recognized platform for his
ongoing series of net art and networked performance art. Cary has curated
international exhibitions of digitally infused eco-art, including Nature
Version 2.0: Ecological Modernities and Digital Environmentalism,
Technorganic, and Wilderness Information Network. He is assistant professor
of art at Colgate University where he teaches courses in the theory and
practice of digital and new media art. Cary has been the recipient of
numerous awards, including a Franklin Furnace Performance Grant,
Experimental Television Workshop Grant, and NYSCA's Decentralization Grant.
His work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the
New Museum for Contemporary Art, Computer Fine Arts, and The Whitney Museum
of American Art.

For more Turbulence Commissions, please visit http://turbulence.org.

Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director
New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org
New York: 917.548.7780 . Boston: 617.522.3856
Turbulence: http://turbulence.org
Networked_Performance Blog: http://turbulence.org/blog
Networked_Music_Review: http://turbulence.org/networked_music_review
Upgrade! Boston: http://turbulence.org/upgrade 
New American Radio: http://somewhere.org