Marin Association will organize a Baltic Sea research residenciy with series of workshops in the Summer of 2011 (June-September).
Call for proposals will be sent out in December 2010. Meanwhile, please join our Facebook group (link on the right).
Posts Tagged ‘M.A.R.I.N.’
Baltic Sea Residency 2011
Monday, December 7th, 2009M.A.R.I.N. on return journey
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
Big thanks to AND Festival; such a great start for a new event series. M.A.R.I.N. residency vessel departed Liverpool on Sunday morning after 6 am and set path to Isle of Man, Fort William, Inverness, Copenhagen. This jourey is mostly transit, and time to reflect, and work on writing. The two past months of residency was full of extremely interesting encounters with local marine scientists, artists, and folks from different communities. Besides, it was full on work with authoring, yet we also got to enjoy the festivals, ISEA2009 and AND.
M.A.R.I.N. residency can be developed a lot, of course, but what is exciting is that even with a year’s lead to production this Irish Sea residency was a great success. I would like to thank the participating artists, sailors and collaborators on shore, and not least, all the funders who made the work possible.
Image of Isle of Man before sunset.
Abandon unsustainable residencies
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
M.A.R.I.N. is an investigation in how an art and science residency itself can be sustainable and mobile at the same time. Our main area of research are marine biological and cultural ecosystems. For the AND festival, we abandoned flights for a 11-week residency at the Irish Sea. We sailed an equivalent of 4 hours of flight distance, from North of Germany to Scotland, onto Northern Ireland, and arriving to the coast of Cumbria. Hosted by Folly (Lancaster) we did workshops with SoundWave (Workington), The Dock Museum & Dropzone (Barrow-in-Furness) and Tate & Fact (Liverpool).
Workshop participants have contributed with sound, video and stills, some of which you can listen to at Ecolocated Pool group page. For example, youth from DropZone at Barrow-in-Furness did an hour long rap with their own rhymes, and Tate Youth contributed interviews with friends and family of the changing maritime culture of Liverpool. Some fragments are also uploaded to the Ecolocated map based interface, which includes arrival ship blog to Belfast, and audio and water quality data sonifications around the Albert Dock. An experimental stage version of this interface can also be viewed on 3G mobile phones using your browser, and the URL http://marin.cc/ecolocated/mobile.
You can read blog entries by the resident artists Tapio Mäkelä (FI), Nigel Helyer (AU) and Andreas Siagian (ID), who have collaborated on the project Ecolocated - Littoral Lives.
In Belfast, the Ecolocated team was joined by Michael Lake and Daniel Woo, with whom we authored a major 12-channel surround sound, locative installation, presented at Catalyst Arts gallery, as part of ISEA2009, The International Symposium on Electronic Art. In this work we worked with local marine scientists, historians, ex dock workers and other collaborators. We also measured water quality in the Belfast Lough, map of which was the interface for our project. The end result was a collage where users could navigate through several layers of audio, sonified and visualized data.
Also part of the exhibit here at FACT, The CDPDU (Common Data Processing and Display Unit, M.A.R.I.N. Alpha) by Marko Peljhan, Nejc Trost, and Matthew Biederman, draws satellite marine ecology data and environmental sensor data from a field unit in Santa Barbara, CA, as well as some data from a sister project’s (Arctic Perspective Initiative) expedition to Baffin Bay last month.
In Liverpool, M.A.R.I.N. had a very interesting visit to the British Oceanographic Data Centre, and The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory. We participated to a Shelf sea workshop, where scientists (and electronic engineers really) discussed latest sea bed velocity sensors, HF radar for wave detection. In the basement of BODC we saw a sonde that makes our water measurement equipment seem like kids play: a gliding torpedo shaped UAV, which uses ballast to zigsaw through the ocean. At the end of an inspiring tour, a discussion with 7 researchers opened up real possibilities for future collaboration ranging from semantic, cartographic, visual and haptic interfaces to environmental data.
Kingdoms and Ports
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
We were spending several days in Liverpool Marina before we go to Albert Dock for our participation in Abandon Normal Devices (AND) festival. The sunny and warm weather greets us in the early morning. It is our first reunion with hot summer during this project; at last! Tapio and Nigel have to be away on the weekend which makes Captain Lars(I call him Cap) and I spending the weekend and share the boat together. First thing in our plan was to do an exploration and see some of the local cultures and identities of Liverpool.
After visited Liverpool’s main attraction, Cap took me on a small boat tour cruising from Coburg dock to Albert dock. Cap have an idea to do a business with our small boat by giving a tour, rivalling TheYellowDuckMarine! After one second of hard thinking, I said no! We decided to amuse orself by sightseeing along the canals that connecting the docks.
All this short exploration have showned strong maritime history and culture of the city! The big docks and ports in Liverpool remind me of an old belief in Indonesia saying; “A great kingdom must have a great Naval force”. This belief have been one of the foundation of the three early kingdom in Indonesia named: Tarumanagara, Sriwijaya and Majapahit. We can also see simillar things of the kingdoms in South East Asia through Ayuttaya Kingdom in Thailand who also have strong maritime history in the past. It’s too bad there’s so little evidence of such beautiful docks in Indonesia comparing as we seen in Liverpool and Bangkok. I guess we can’t be too greedy and satisfied with the temples.
Tiny Emission
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
After spending several days in Whitehaven, we finally have a clear sky to head sail to Liverpool. We say goodbye to the Harbor Master in the afternoon as we headed south with small waves on our path. We’re doing 6 knots in average with the help of mild winds on our sail, slowly “drift” us to our destination. The landscape view was amazing with several old structures stand on it. One of it was an old coal mine on top of the hill located in south of Whitehaven.
We passed across Sellafield, an old nuclear powerplant that is located near the shore on our way south.We took a water quality reading while we were on the nearest shore to Sellafield, looking for some environmental hazard on the site. Our equipment were unable to detect such things, the reading was quite normal. It seems that if the problem was there, it will need more advance equipment and intensive research to be done to detect such. We stored the data to sonify it during AND festival in Liverpool.
As we enjoyed the sail until night came, Nigel and I were talking and having hot tea to warm ourselves from the cold breeze. Nigel spotted tiny blue-green light on the surface of the sea. They appeared as small light many times by the ripple path from the catamaran. Looking at it’s size and light intensity, there’s only one possibility explaining what it was. Bioluminescence, a light emission produced by a certain marine micro-organism from an phylum called dinoflagellates was responding to the vibration from the ripple from the catamaran. This interesting creature have created an interesting discusssion between us. It was unexpected sighting for us to saw them in Liverpool bay since as far as we knew that most of them were seen in warmer sea region.
As we approcahed Liverpool dock, wind turbines welcome us with their blinking red lights. We didn’t knew them at the beginning and thought they were the main entrance to Mersey River. I really enjoyed the sailing experience on this day and was also capturing what Nigel have wrote in this blog; WhiteHaven to Liverpool; An Illustrated History of Power. The main fossil fuel that is used by human for generating power today is coal. The thermodynamic of coal powerplant used today is about 30%, which means about 70% of it will turn in to waste heat. Dinoflagellates however, have gone through millions of years evolution to produce their own light emission. What an advance tiny creatures they are.
As we reached Liverpool Marina in the early morning, we were too tired to do anything more. The sail was great but nearly took our entire energy the whole day. After I desalinate myself, I was imagining a city with light bulbs powered by dinolagellates. An advance light emission by converting chemicals to energy. Or Chemiluminescence: Maybe? Crazy! or: Nice!