OROGENY OF THE MISTS
Abstract
This paper presents the preliminary phases of a generative arts projects that is currently being developed by the team of the NXI Gestatio design lab, our research-creation center at University of Quebec in Montreal, and by Jean-Marc Chomaz, director of the Hydrodynamics laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique (LadHyX) in France. The project itself has been selected through a competition about the potential of arts for promoting and supporting sustainable development, a very trendy topic that is progressively contaminating a lot of art ventures and institutions. It consists in an installation in which the body of the visitors, immersed in a forest of mist trees, act as an antenna to detect some of the rhythms of the world as transmitted by sounds, vibrations, light modulations and by the mist itself.
Introduction
It is now widely accepted that art can be a powerful vector of knowledge and awareness. The recent emergence and development of the field of research-creation, born from a gathering of disciplines related to creation and design, is anchored in the conviction that the experience of art is related to the transmission of some form of knowledge; that this knowledge, as well as the modes by which it is communicated, can be rigorously defined, explicited, communicated and taught; and that it can be constituted into a validated body or corpus on which, like for pure or applied research, creators-researchers of the future can rely for the advancement of their own work, and of the field in general. Since its nature is still being defined, and since the field is hardly more than one half-century old, this corpus, as well as its methodologies and validation processes, is still in its infancy stage.
As a consequence, conceiving a work of art from the information and knowledge it is supposed to convey remains a risky process. Many such attempts have drifted towards pedagogical or educational projects; many others have limited themselves to straightforward, isomorphic transpositions of events, principles or phenomena, in what could be called thermometer or VU-meter devices. Fact is, any such venture should from the very beginning eliminate knowledge transmission through explanations or objective demonstrations, and explore the many other ways by which we, as thinking and conscious beings, end up subscribing to a proposal or to an idea – analogies, intuition, direct experience, situation, impressions and emotions, and so on.
The concept behind Orogeny of the Mists is an attempt at such an exploration. It was born from an observation: the failure of scientific demonstrations to induce in the vast majority of people the awareness that is needed to trigger the major behavioral changes required to preserve the environment and the planet, and the critical role that art can play in front of this situation 1. Despite an overwhelming consensus among scientists, self-destructive -and even suicidal- behaviors remain the norm. Every attempt by the powers in place to limit them is seen as an intolerable attack on individual liberties. Examples are innumerous, but one of the saddest one concerns the CO2 emissions by vehicles with thermic motors. Increasing the price of gas, or limiting the maximal speed on main roads and highways, have triggered some of the most important protest movements of the last decades in France, when such moves are unanimously recognized as having a strong and demonstrated positive effect on the diminution of atmospheric pollutants and greenhouse gas; in all of the Western world, every decrease in the price of gas is immediately followed by an increase in the purchase of gas-guzzler vehicles. This short-term thinking is by itself enough to demonstrate that the absolute necessity to urgently act for the environment is far to be accepted, less again integrated, by the population in general. Many researchers in human sciences have pointed out the fact that, just like for the COVID-19 crisis, essential changes and reactions occur only when the impact becomes immediate, the threat visible, and the damage indisputable.
In front of such a crisis situation, a lot of artists and art organization have oriented part of their work or activity towards projects that try to awaken environmental consciousness through specific pieces or events, with various success. One cannot eliminate the possibility that some of these reorientations were dictated by a high level of opportunism – greenwashing is a rampant tendency in the arts as well as in business or politics – but we can only rejoice to see the number of artistic disciplines that currently move in this direction.
The Observatories of the Inaccessible: a research-creation program
The piece we propose gets its name from the concepts that underlie it. The word “orogeny” refers to the various mechanisms at the origin of the rising and evolution of mountains and mountain ranges, like volcanism and plate tectonics. It belongs to a much wider research-creation program named “Observatories of the Inaccessible”, whose aim is to bring to conscious perception phenomena, places, events and information that are, for different reasons – geographical, temporal, informational - impossible to perceive, less again observe. The program itself is rooted in the conviction that we are more inclined to take care of what we can know directly. Though we all know, to various degrees, that we live on a rather small planet orbiting around a rather standard star, there are very few cues around us that translate the planetary nature of the Earth, nor the striking complexity and interrelations of all the phenomena that this nature imply; less again its incredible fragility in the intersidereal cosmos.
Fig. 1 - “A pale blue dot” – In this famous picture, taken by probe Voyager 1 in 1990 while it was leaving the Solar System, the Earth appears as a single blue dot in the immensity of the cosmos. Hardly any other picture better translates the vulnerability of the place where all the events we know since the beginning of the history of mankind have been happening. Photo by Par NASA/JPL-Caltech; Wikimedia Commons.
To reach this goal, a set of in situ devices, called Studies, will be implemented at specific locations. For instance, Study No 1, Abyssal Observer, is a panoscopic multi-camera system that will be installed at the bottom of the ocean on an abyssal plain, off the coast of British Columbia, more than 2000 meters deep. It will transmit real time a panoramic, 360 degrees dynamic view of the deep-sea landscape, as well as the sounds of the place, to an immersive environment located in an art center that can be thousands of kilometers away. Study No 3, A Wegener Harp, will translate in a visible light phenomenon the relative movement of two transforming tectonic plates. Study No 5, Stone Foreshores, will demonstrate the little-known phenomenon of continental tides – movements that affect twice every day the continental plates on which we walk. Study No 6, Pluto’s Hare, consists in dropping a controlled free-fall probe in a deep volcanic crater (4000 meters or more); the images of the fall and of the landing on the lava lake will be transmitted during the fall. Eleven such studies are currently planned 2.
All the Observatories together will constitute a bestiary of phenomena, much similar to the natural sciences catalogues of the XIXth century, in which various plants, birds, stones, animals, were gathered in books with beautiful paintings or engravings. In such works, the accidental proximities on a same page of specimens coming at times from very distinct and even remote areas created a strange natural poetry, a kind of fantastic kaleidoscope that quickly revealed the extraordinary variety of nature’s strategies, and awakened the desire for exploring, discovering and taking care of a world that could produce so many wonders and variations on similar themes. The phenomena probed and staged by the Observatories will be published as a dynamic on-line catalog, in which their fundamental poetry will be presented along the current scientific theories and models that are used to describe them, and with a synthetic page that allows the reader to compare directly the paces of their evolution: each one unrolls on its own time scale and rhythm. This may seem like an obvious statement, but it is less so if we add that all these rhythms oscillate together with periods that differ by amounts that defy even the wildest imagination: between the frequency of the pulse of an atom that emits visible light and the period of rotation of the Sun around the Milky Way, the ratio is on the order of 1030. According to the beautiful vision of the Portuguese philosopher Dos Santos, quoted by Bachelard, all these rhythms are constitutive of the world 3. Objects, events and phenomena emerge from their interferences, their encounters and their beats: the reality of the world appears as a constant and permanent work of harmonic adjustment.
The aim of our research-creation program is to bring to consciousness the existence, number and rhythms of these phenomena which take place simultaneously around us as a time choreography, and whose pulsations, be they synchronized or out of phase, trigger the emergence of our physical world. Each of them can become the yardstick or the measure of the others, without privileging any. Each one, while listening to the piece being played by the others, plays its own piece for the others. To become aware of their unfolding is to give oneself the opportunity to hear the song of the world. It allows us to realize that our presence in the world is itself one of these phenomena, endowed with its own rhythms; our very existence, our consciousness, our minds, are part of them; the universe we inhabit is created from the encounter that takes place between them and our very presence. We are not mere observers of nature and reality: we belong to it, in all of our dimensions, biological, physiological, physical, psychological, poetical. As a consequence, whatever we do to nature, we do to ourselves; taking care of nature, taking care of the planet and of all that live, is taking care of ourselves.
Mists, winds and earthquakes: a delocalized in situ installation
The Observatories of the Inaccessible program was unrolling at a steady pace for three years, and several site trips were planned in the last months: the in situ nature of the planned projects request a precise evaluation and examination of the installation sites before finalizing the design of the probing devices. Unfortunately, travel restrictions due to the pandemics have temporarily brought most of the Studies to a near halt. We therefore decided to develop a new Study, specifically conceived for the troubled times we are going through, that will be based on the same principles, but that will eliminate the in situ constraint. In other words, instead of bringing a specific device to its assigned location, we bring the location to the place where the device is installed. It is this work that we are presenting here, and whose development and current stage will be described in the next sections.
In its current state, Orogeny of the Mists is an attempt to shape and sculpt an aethereal material, namely mist, through sound waves of low frequency and high intensity, and through controlled airflows. The sounds themselves are triggered by the occurrence of earthquakes around the planet, as detected by the various seismology institutes of the globe, and transmitted by internet. The whole installation takes place within a several-meters wide enclosure whose walls are made from thermo-retractable mirror films, in which people are invited to enter.
Inside the enclosure is a small forest whose trunks are made of columns of mist - a mist grove, or forest - which rise up and deploy close to the ceiling to evoke a canopy. Twelve such trees are planned. The atmosphere, kept in a permanent chiaroscuro, is slightly misty. Oblique planar laser planes intersect the trees and the mist, discreetly revealing their internal movement and anatomy. Sound transductors, fixed on the stretched enclosing membranes, emit a very slight murmur coming from the transposition of the movement of the mists into sounds when they are disturbed by the passage of visitors. Series of controlled fans of different sizes are used to control the fluxes of air and water aerosols. The water itself is rain water, collected prior to the event. It is recycled during the time of the installation, and constantly sterilized by exposition to a UV light.
At irregular intervals, other sound waves are heard. They are extremely powerful and propagate on very low frequency, with a very strong dynamic. They occur suddenly, like thunderclaps. They are emitted by two series of loudspeakers. The first one is made of several hyperdirectional devices that project sound beams as precisely delimited as light beams. The second one consists in two subwoofers speakers that emit on very low frequencies (lower than 25 Hz). These are the sounds that translate the occurrence of earthquakes in the earth's crust all over the planet. Their amplitude and frequency are defined by the magnitude of the earthquakes, and by the distance between their epicenters and the location of the installation. All the speakers are powerful enough to create air displacements that locally disrupt the equilibrium of the mists, creating visible oscillations that propagate for several seconds in the atmosphere, shaking the mist trees, sometimes tearing them into shreds of clouds, creating changing patterns in the oblique light planes defined by the lasers.
Fig. 2 – Simulation of the mist forest. Every trunk is made of a water aerosol, a micro-droplets spray propelled by small turbines blowing through honeycomb panels, surrounded by a ring of invisible airflows. Very thin planar laser beams cut through the mists and fogs, revealing their moving internal anatomy. The whole installation is surrounded by thermo-retractable mirror films that protect the installation site from the humidity generated by the mists, and that allows an almost complete recycling of the water.
Narrative scenarios are being explored. One of them, when the earthquakes and the corresponding sounds become particularly powerful, sees the mist trees completely disintegrate, filling the room with patches of fog. The visitor then finds himself at the heart of a large cloud crossed by planes of light which reveal its internal structure. The fog will then concentrate in the lower part of the room, forming a translucent lake in which visitors will be half-submerged, and rises to form a mountain-like wave. After a while, the wave falls, the mist trees recondensate, and the atmosphere returns to its initial whispering state.
Fig. 3 – Bases of the mist trees (computer image). Made from aluminum and clear acrylic, they contain the water, the sprayers and the fans required to produce and shape the mist and air flows that generate the trunks. The honeycomb panels have been removed from the two bases in the forefront so as to reveal the fans.
On mists and earthquakes: technological considerations
Working with mist, clouds and fog as artistic materials presents significant challenges. Several artists have already worked on related themes, staging or photographing events involving real or simulated micro-clouds. We can for instance evoke the collisions of clouds by M.F. Chan4, the vaporous formations by M.L. Nadal5, the photos of clouds in interior spaces by B. Smilde6, the Blur Building by Diller + Scofidio7 ... But the direct control, even approximate, of mists, fogs and clouds has never been, to our knowledge, the subject of artistic attempts. Yet its potential is immense: this protean material can adopt a wide variety of configurations, textures and transparency. However, mastering it requires an in-depth knowledge of the behavior of fluids at all levels: shaping, reaction to interrelated atmospheric parameters (temperature, humidity, pressure, oscillations, convection, radiation...), size of the droplets, which must be small enough to escape gravity without evaporating too fast ... Then, associating the behavior of mists with that of earthquakes through air currents and sound vibrations is a way of establishing a dialogue between two materials of completely opposite nature, and to immerse the visitor in very different time and space scales that are simultaneously atmospheric and terrestrial.
To achieve this result, the setup we are preparing becomes an experimental platform in science-art. It will allow us to explore several scenarios featuring the interactions between mist, fog, earthquakes, winds, sounds and atmosphere. We plan for instance to study the impact of stationary waves on the condensation of the mist. On precise frequencies, the wavelength of the sound becomes precisely tuned to the length of the enclosure. A stationary wave then appears. Its vibration nodes and antinodes, easy to detect by the unassisted ear, correspond to zones of lower and higher pressure. If the humidity content of the air is precisely adjusted, one should theoretically be able to create a situation where mist condensate only where the nodes are, separating the enclosure in alternatively clear and misty zones.
Acoustic experiments will not be limited to mist sculpting. Since hyperdirectional speakers concentrate the energy of sound waves within narrow beams, we also expect to be able to locally influence the state of the enclosed atmosphere through the emission of specific frequencies in the medium range. Such loudspeakers create audible sounds through interferences between ultrasonic waves, which means that a sound with a given wavelength includes at least three different frequencies, two of them being in the range of ultrasounds – typically between 200 000 and 220 000 Hz. This corresponds to wavelengths on the order of the millimeter. Though somewhat larger than the mist droplets, whose size can reach more than 0,5 mm, these waves can theoretically have a visible impact on the mist distribution in the air. Considering that they will also bounce on the thermo-retractable films that constitute the walls of the enclosure, just like light beams on mirrors; that these films will have a degree of elasticity that will introduce unexpected perturbations in the waves and that the transducers transform them in wide-area sound-emitting surfaces; it is easy to see that the whole installation becomes a highly non-linear physical system in which the rhythms of the earthquakes, of the lights and of the sound waves will generate an ever-changing atmosphere, in which the visitor, completely immersed in the humidity of the mist grove, will feel and perceive, by all of his senses, the vibrations and oscillations of the air and of the dim light.
Fig. 4 – Experimental setup at the Hydrodynamics laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique (France), spring of 2020. First tests with a mist column surrounded by a tube of invisible air flows, in order to maintain the cylindrical shape of the mist trunk. The objective of the experiment is to improve the definition and precision of the trunk up to several meters high, by literally sculpting the mist cloud with laminar air streams blowing from the micro-tubes of a honeycomb panel.
Two categories of fans will be used. The smaller ones will control the shape of the trees and of the canopies, through a principle developed by one of us for previous works8. The challenge here is to generate air flows that must remain laminar over long distances, without generating turbulence. This can be achieved through the use of small ultra-quiet fans, assembled in arrays of several dozen pieces, blowing through panels of honeycomb material; the original flow is thus divided into hundreds hexagonal micro-flows ( few millimeters wide) which mutually maintain their laminarity over several meters. More than one hundred such fans are required to maintain the shape of a 12-inch diameter mist trunk over three meters. A specific interface will allow to individually control them, in order to explore the influence of small airflow variations on the shape of the trunks and the general behavior of the mists. The larger fans will be used for controlling bigger masses of aerosols and fogs.
The light planes will be produced by rotating laser devices. Often used to achieve grandiose or spectacular effects, lasers actually reveal all their artistic potential through their ability to produce effects of great subtlety, and to literally sculpt space with almost imperceptible gleams and flickers. In the installation, they will reveal the ever-changing internal anatomy of the mists, building a moving architecture with oblique, infinitely thin walls of light. They will also allow to materialize the passage of infrasonic sound waves, which will cross the light planes like compact air lumps, creating oscillations and wrinkles that will propagate on light surfaces, evoking the specific nature of seismic phenomena.
As mentioned in the introduction of this paper, Orogeny of the Mist has won a France-Quebec competition on the thematic of art and sustainable development. The current international health situation makes difficult to announce a precise calendar for its inauguration. According to our current plans, a demo, showing one mist tree in a small enclosure, should be presented at the Cent-Quatre, a major contemporary arts center in Paris, in November of the present year. We expect to be able to present the full work in the same center around the summer of 2021, and a little bit later at the Centre Phi, another important art center in Montreal, by the fall of the same year.
The artistic hypothesis: a research-creation concept
As mentioned above, predicting the results of research-creation projects is always a risky venture. This is especially true in works such as the one presented here, which involves several interacting complex systems, and whose final aspect and behavior rely on several assumptions that can only be verified through experimentations involving a complete and finalized setup. It is only through previous experiences, intuitions and a deep knowledge about the separate elements that a positive prognosis can be made about the artistic potential of the final result; research-creation is precisely the realm in which such explorations can be pursued.
In any research work, the experimental methodology should ideally be developed from the implications of a research question. I will thus end up this paper by presenting the equivalent of such a question, in the form of an artistic – or poetic ? – hypothesis, which can be stated as follows, and whose validation will only occur at the end of the whole project. Through the atmospheric tsunamis that will be generated, triggered just like their oceanic counterparts by seismic events, a dialogue of vibrations and tremors, transposed to human scale, will take place between the invisible architecture of the winds, the evanescent forest of mists and the massive opacity of the tectonic plates. The total entanglement of geological, atmospheric and biological phenomena and times will become tangible, perceived through the movement of the bodies, the moisture in the lungs, the contact of air on the skin, the vibration of light and pressure: the body itself, through its intermediate state between solid and fluid, will become the antenna by which all these events are probed and sensed. Immersed in clouds, wandering between thin light membranes, among the sounds that disrupt and sculpt the mist, the visitor becomes aware of the rhythms of the world and of their immanent presence. He sees the possibility of harmonizing with them his own inner agitation – the fundamental rhythms to which he owes his very existence, and realizes that all the places of our daily life are small fragments of a space of cosmic dimensions, crossed by influences coming from all levels and scales of reality, with which our organism harmonizes its own pace during the time of our passage on Earth.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 A large number of papers, books and blogs deal with that question. See for instance the following site: https://www.sansdirectionfixe.com/blog/lart-peut-il-sauver-la-planete (last visited July 31st, 2020).
2 Details on all the Studies that are currently planned, as well as the theoretical and historical origins of the program, can be consulted at URL observatoires.nxigestatio.org.
3 This is the central argument in Bachelard’s “Dialectique de la Durée”. The following quote appears in p. 136: “Toute conquête de structure s'accompagne d'une mise en harmonie de rythmes multiples », which translates by: “ Every structuration process is accompanied by the harmonization of multiple rythms”. In Bachelard, G. – Dialectique de la durée, Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.
4 See for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj3jTw2DxXQ&t=742s, last visited 01/07/2020
5 http://www.marielucenadal.com/Eolorium, last visited 01/07/2020
6 https://www.berndnaut.nl/works/nimbus/ - last visited 01/07/2020
7 https://dsrny.com/project/blur-building - last visited 01/07/2020
8 Chomaz,J.M. – Science and Art of Sculpturing Fluids, Leonardo, Vol.47, Issue 1, Feb. 2014, p. 66-67
The development of the Orogeny of the Mists project is documented at orogenie.nxigestatio.org
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