Artistic explorations

Elsa has grown from a worldbuilding process, a storyworld of a New Reactive Earth. 

The motivation behind the fiction story world came out of a longing for a more sustainable life and art practice and was concreticized through the collaboration with Ronald Mallet. It was then further developed through methods of speculation, embodied worldbuilding and rule based frameworks limiting access to energy and resources.

The foundation for the storyworld formed when Ron Mallet and I staged and improvised scenarios and fictional speculations around his time machine theory. These speculations made the idea real to me in a new way. I could believe that the time machine was now running, because I acted it out with its maker. Now it was possible for me to imagine a continuation of the narrative. It made it possible to imagine a kind of cyborg gaia, a New Reactive Earth, with the storyworld premise:

- Future generations has, thanks to Mallets time technology, hacked the present so that the earth system updated herself into a cyborg gaia. Cyborg gaia monitors and regulate how all inhabitants use resources & life-space.

/notes from NRE 00-00-01

As a way to embody this premise I started to track my climate footprint and submit to limitations of energy and resources in my project. Through the collaboration with Anna Björklund at KTH we carried out life cycle assessments (LCA) on all my artistic activities. As a result of paying attention to the climate footprint of my action grew the longing to reduce that footprint. The result of the LCA became a benchmark from which a real change could be verified. The sense of being assessed and regulated in relation to the environment gave me a sense of living on a New Reactive Earth.

-With this technology the powerrelationship between present and future shifted. Allowing futures to implement its research in earlier points in present time, by sending back subatomic particles that could be transfered to digital code.

When this code was released in the present, it spread through all processes on earth, from technology, to biology, to chemistry and meteorology, connecting everything in a NRE. Earth´s agency became more tangible and direct, acting like a social global organism, a cyborg gaia, with the  purpose of distributing life resources in a way that keep NRE alive. Balancing the withdraws between different agents in the ecosystem.

/notes from NRE 02-12-29

As a way to further embody having my resource use regulated I practiced safe scarcity. Working in periods of different length without Food/electricity/fossil fuels/water/oxygen etc expanded my imaginations around hard stops, juridical and automatically executed justice.

- We are this world with our bodies. We feel it, stronger and stronger, but still only vaguely. We are still calibrating our individual habits with the colony’s logic.

For humans, the system has drastically reduced the possibility to extract resources from the colony, halting practically every activity that previously made up everyday life. When continuing their habits the environment intervene, cancelling them. Lightswitches turn themselves off , cars break down, but start again when more people enters it. Heating only works in very small rooms or very populated rooms. Energy demanding foods loses taste, nutrition and energy. Often we are caught off guard with deaths and chaos as result.

Carbon emissions can´t be outsourced or offsetted anymore, climate compensation transactions have no validity. The amount of life-space you have is tied to each organism/unit. How much your climate footprint is allowed to expand, is balanced between your need as an organism to survive and your contribution to “the whole”. This equation is in constant flux. It requiers an extreme attention to the worlds arrival to be able to balance this.

Aiding structures, for example legal concepts help them to stay within their allotted share, retrench and prioritise the vital needs. Nature’s rights laws is one example of such structure.

/notes from NRE 00-05-20

 

-Knowledge is no longer valued by what information it contains. Its form and immediate effects are premiered instead. Knowledge-forms that in themselves enables or produce a decreased stress on the colony is the only research possible to conduct.

/notes from NRE 05-01-04

- Things have lost their value in relation to human history or culture. Ex objects transform into any forms that the cycle invites their material compound to become.

-Humans has developed the ability to go into hibernation. When a person run out of their life-space share they go into saving mode, and maybe at a later time they will have accumulated a buffer in order to come back. Meanwhile they reside in cocoons hanging horizontally in the ceilings of their kin's homes. Hibernated humans can survive for up to three years in this state.

/notes from NRE 06-03-20

ˈɛlsə, the climate calculator for film, is the result of a combination of embodied artistic exploration and transdiciplinary collaborations.

 Elsa is a webbased opensource climate-calculator materialized through to the dedicated and creative contributions from specialists in many different fields. Elsa invites filmmakers and artists to explore and get to know the climate footprint of their practices.

Elsa is a guide, a score, to shift & direct conciousness around our art practices. With shifts in attention comes other shifts. Shifts in priorities, in values, in practices, in aestetics.

As creatives we are used to having our behaviour and work mined as data, analysed and made profit from a variety of online platforms. With Elsa we can access our data, learn from it, use the analysis to make concious choices of how to deveolp our practices. Make ourselves independent from infrastructures we don’t believe in & begin to identify supporting structures we do need.

 Elsa aims to support artists and filmmakers  in shifting their practices towards more climate-just productions .
The quantitative methods in artistic practices can play a role in breaking with internalized and normalized outdated structures or unjust privileges. When you are used to privilege, equality may feel like oppression. Then we may need to measure things in order to render the inequalities visible

Elsa is part of a cyborg gaia and a portal to a new reactive earth, where our practices acknowledge its relation to our environment.

Transdiciplinary collaborations

In 2011 I went to connectiocut to Work with professor in physics Ronald Mallett who had developed a working theory for a time machine. I wanted to explore how this theory could effect our relationship to future generations. Our current overdraw of resources accumulates a growing debt to future generations that they has no means of claiming. The way this time technology worked, I thought might turn this askew powerrelationship around. By discussing and staging different scenarios with Ron Mallet I had a whole new view on how climate-justice between generations could be conceptualized.

In my search for ways to put climate-justice in practice, to quantify, compare and distribute resources I came in contact with Daniel Pargman and a research group at MID, KTH I started following their research. I presented my project at one of their meetings and got some valuable feedback and guidance. They introduced me to the field of Life Cycle Asessment (LCA) as a way to quantify the climate impact of different processes.  They put me in contact with Anna Björklund professor in Environmental Strategic Research and specialized in application of environmental LCA. Through many interessting exchanges Björklund and I developed the project Transforming Practices , via NAVET, that aimed to asess the life cycle climate impact of my artistic practice and research and also practices at the film and media department. The research engineer Karin Lagercrantz was engaged to carry out the asessments. Togethter with Lagercrantz I gathered data from all my activities in my artistic research and practice. The results were published in the report Klimatavtrycket för projektet Klimaträttvist Världande. This assessment gave me a heightend understanding of how the different activities and materials inmy practice effected the climate and environment. But I also wanted to have the possibility to have that kind of feedback in my coming projects and preferably a continuous fedback as part of the ongoing practice so that I get the knowledge before artistic decisions are being made and can guide to find alternative ways. To enable that, Lagercrants developed the excel based climate calculatorKlimatkalkylator för Lina Persson,custom made for my artpractice.

To upscale this to a structural level and make these results reproducable we carried out the same process on four filmproductions by the film and media degree students 2021. With the support and guidance of producer Lena Kempe, Lagercrants carried out a LCA on the films; Försvar, Tjejtoan 4-ever, Ziba och Patient och undertecknad. The process is described in the report Klimatberäkningar på filmproduktion (diva link!!)

and resulted in the excel climate calculator Elsa. The excel calculator was included in in the course documents at the film and media department. During the process I had been in contact with other filmworkers who also tried to help the film industry to move in more sustainable directions. Anna Björklund and I joined the reference group for Hållbar Film with Ronny Fritsche and Film i Väst and met with Film på Gotland and Film i Stockholm to discuss development possibilities. Faced with the challanges to communicate and disseminate this research I engaged graphic designer Benedetta Crippa. Crippa divided her practice between being  responsible for strategy, design and implementation of visual communication at Stockholm Environment Institute and her own independent critical design practice and I found her to be the perfect person to help communicate this project. one of many suggestions for development was an online verion of the calculator. An open source, available to all, easy and fun to use, science based climate calculator for film. Crippa started developing the design and Ilaria Roglieri was engaged for the webdevelopment.