Marina Zurkow
in collaboration with James Schmitz
World Wind
Dec 15, 2022–Feb 18, 2023
NYC
Marina Zurkow World Wind, 2022
Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz The Breath Eaters, 2022
Marina Zurkow Crucible for surging, bursting, and spreading, 2022
Marina Zurkow Crucible for rising, rolling, and looping, 2022
Marina Zurkow Crucible for crumpling and folding, 2022
Marina Zurkow Crucible for condensing and drifting, 2022
Marina Zurkow Crucible for inundating and disintegrating, 2022
Marina Zurkow Crucible for erupting and disgorging, 2022
Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz, Does the River Flow Both Ways?, 2022
Marina Zurkow Crucible for smoldering and igniting, 2022
Marina Zurkow Crucible for speeding and rotating, 2022
Marina Zurkow World Wind, 2022
Marina Zurkow World Wind, 2022
World Wind
Marina Zurkow in collaboration with James Schmitz
December 15, 2022–February 18, 2023
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 15, 6–8 PM
Winter Break: December 24, 2022 – January 3, 2023
Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Saturday: 11 AM–6 PM
World Wind is an exhibition featuring new artworks by Marina Zurkow and collaborative, generative pieces by Zurkow and James Schmitz. The title of the exhibition takes inspiration from a mural made by Zurkow in collaboration with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence software that creates images from textual descriptions. Through a prompt by the artist to the software—“World War II agitprop map of pollution and climate change”—World Wind incorporates AI’s perception of climate change with the artist’s guidance, editing, and direction. Zurkow positions iconography representative of ecological transformation within a style reminiscent of lithography and propaganda. Bordered by bold red and thick lettering, the work suggests both a reference to the past and a nod towards an inevitable future. Wind acts as a uniting force of this exhibition. Summoned through open source data and artificial intelligence, wind is a personification of global entanglement and a harbinger of change.
The Breath Eaters is an animated, custom software work by Zurkow and Schmitz that visualizes CO2 pollutants and other greenhouse gasses produced by wildfire and fossil fuel plant emissions. Inspired by a Midjourney image of a world map and presented as a live, three-channel generative composition, the work demonstrates how pollution is carried into the high atmosphere and across the globe on currents of wind. The Breath Eaters broadcasts real-time data from NASA’s fire detection systems, World Resources Institute’s global fossil fuel power plant database, and NOAA’s global forecast system. Zurkow expands on the notion of visualizing global emissions, writing “If carbon has been extracted and liberated to roam the globe on the winds, why is the world of beings (human, plant, animal) constrained by national boundaries, walled in and walled out? It is our hope that a near-live data stream of pollution’s transnationalism will give rise to empathy in viewers—this map can look very different with planetary action.” As the triptych globe turns within the gallery, visitors witness an immediate impression of global carbon pollution.
World Wind urges a conversation between individual and global moments, with Zurkow’s Crucible series touching on intimate aspects of this relationship. The porous connection between a lived experience to the far-reaching environment is portrayed through domestic, material manifestations. The artist’s own souvenirs, inherited objects, and hand-built ceramics interface with instances of environmental disaster and geo-planetary disruption. Crucible for erupting and disgorging depicts a hand-crafted bauble situated before a volcanic eruption; Crucible for surging, bursting, and spreading uses NOAA imagery of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the grounding for a dead bee and found barnacles.
Does The River Flow Both Ways? carries this awareness into an alternate reality. Zurkow and Schmitz’s generative artwork explores a present-day Hudson River estuary in which happy social and biological ecosystems live in harmony; a place where humans can interact with the water in intimate ways and experience what is happening below its surface. The title questions whether such a techno-optimistic vision is viable. In good faith, the animated, software-driven work portrays a world in which renewables, public transport, water shipment, sensual freedom, and multi-species ecologies can coexist, even thrive, during a turbulent climactic period undergirded by a continued commitment to Capitalism. The animated elements emerge primarily in response to algorithmic probability as well as real-time weather and tide data.
Marina Zurkow
b.1962, New York, NY
Lives and works in the Mid-Hudson Valley, New York
Marina Zurkow is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections. She uses technologies including software, animation, audio, food, and biomaterials to foster intimate multispecies and geophysical connections. She works as a founding member of several collaborative initiatives, including Dear Climate, Making the Best of It: Nimble Foods for Climate Change, Climoji, and Investing in Futures.
Zurkow is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow. She has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. Currently, she is a fellow at Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute.
James Schmitz
b. 1975, New York
Lives and works in the Lower Hudson Valley, New York
Jim Schmitz is an artist and technologist exploring the expressive intersections of art, data, and science. He builds open source software tools and frameworks for artists, scientists, and the creative coding community. He is the author of the Python Processing framework py5.
Schmitz earned a master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and was a Research Resident at ITP from August 2019 to August 2020.
Download the Press Release
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to the generous feedback and inspiration from friends and colleagues: Una Chaudhuri, Lafayette Cruise, Heather Davis, Chris Doyle, Kathleen Forde, Elaine Gan, Stephen Gross (Brooklyn Editions),Carolyn Hall, Siddhartha Hayes, Toland Kister, Franziska Lamprecht, Clarinda Mac Low, Sonali McDermid, Tony Patrick, Christiane Paul, Carrie Roble, Sarah Rothberg, Abigail Simon, Tina Walsh, the Hudson River Park’s River Project, and the bitforms team Valerie Amend, Mingna Li, Scott Neal, Tyler Rutledge, and Steven Sacks.
We gratefully acknowledge the commitment of NASA, NOAA, World Resources Institute, and Natural Earth to keep their data open—free to use and to learn from. We would also like to acknowledge Cameron Beccario for the earth.nullschool.net project, which aided our understanding of NASA and NOAA’s available earth science data.
We would like to thank the Processing Foundation for their software that powers both of our animated works.
Citations:
Global Energy Observatory, Google, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Enipedia, World Resources Institute. 2018. Global Power Plant Database. Published on Resource Watch and Google Earth Engine; http://resourcewatch.org/ https://earthengine.google.com/
References
The world is a knot in motion.
– Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 2003
Breathing: You invisible poem!
Complete interchange of your own essence
with world-space. You counterweight
in which I rhythmically happen.
Single wave-motion
whose gradual sea I am;
you, most inclusive of all our
possible seas-space grown warm.
How many regions in space
have already been inside me.
There are winds
that seem like my wandering son.
Do you recognize me, Air,
full of places I once absorbed?
You who were the smooth bark,
roundness, and leaf of my words?
– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, No. I, 1922.
The enactment of a more-than-human politics calls explicitly for a politics beyond the individual, and beyond the nation-state. It calls for care, rather than legislation, to guide it.
–James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, 2022.
Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in the possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be integrated within a local ecosystem which overlaps with ecosystems which are larger and further away. To be a living thing is to exist in two bodies. You breathe something in, and what you breathe out is something else. Your first body is the place you live in, made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence – it is a version of you. It is not a concept, it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of the emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another. The concept of a global impact is not working for us, and in the meantime, your body has already eaten the distance. Your first body could be sitting alone in a church in the centre of Marseille, but your second body is floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container in the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs. every animal body implicated in the whole world. Even the patient who is anesthetized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeon’s lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. It is understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body – your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies.
— Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body, 2017.
…There is no doubt that the skies are closing in. Caught in the stranglehold of injustice and inequality, much of humanity is threatened by a great chokehold as the sense that our world is in a state of reprieve spreads far and wide. If, in these circumstances, a day after comes, it cannot come at the expense of some, always the same ones, as in the Ancienne Économie—the economy that preceded this revolution. It must necessarily be a day for all the inhabitants of Earth, without distinction as to species, race, sex, citizenship, religion, or other differentiating marker. In other words, a day after will come but only with a giant rupture, the result of radical imagination.
All these wars on life begin by taking away breath.
– Achille Mbembe, The Universal Right to Breathe, 2020.
