Turbulence Commission:

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.