EL IMPACTO AMBIENTAL

Introduction

Figure 7: Stills from Apple’s iPhone 7 Red Balloon ad, 2016.

Taking its cue from the 1956 classic film The Red Balloon, Apple’s 2016 iPhone 7 ad turns a text message into a sentient red balloon. The 1s and 0s that must travel through a non bucolic highway of wires are instead manifested as a friendly bit of

inflated plastic. The balloon floats from open window to open window through human- less landscapes of mountains, fields, and streams. It dances its way through branches while “there isn’t a mountain too high” tones in the background. It is unstoppable. Unpoppable. As it approaches its destination, it meets its friends, multicolored balloons who are also lightly, spritely moving on their own flight paths toward their final

destinations. Our red balloon, after traveling mountain and morass, lands at its destination, back in its original form, as a digital balloon part of an excitedly-received happy birthday text message. The digital embodies its plasticity but does so in a way that still makes the digital immaterial. And practically magic.

Compare that to Pinar Yoldas’s An Ecosystem of Excess (2013). In Ecosystem, artist Pinar Yoldas teases out the consequences of our technospheric Anthropocenic lifestyles by creating a living ecosystem out of a hypothetical technospheric primordial soup. Taking as a premise that today’s waste heaps are tomorrow’s breeding grounds, the question Yoldas explores in Ecosystem is one of evolution: if our current consumer excesses—the expanding digital network-of-things among them—are leading to man- made environments characterized by waste, pollution, loss of biodiversity, and extreme weather events, how might organisms of the future evolve to adapt? In Ecosystem, Yoldas combines artistic innovation with scientific and socio-economic data to investigate what, or who, may come from our wasteful consumption. Hers is an eco-

rhetorical strategy that transforms the refuse of human excess into material for speculative design.

Yoldas’s Ecosystem includes insects, fish, birds, and reptiles that are endowed with what she terms “petrogestive” organs that sense and metabolize the waste plastics that now populate our air, soil, and water. 172 _{Responding to the fact that hundreds of}

thousands of marine turtles die each year from ingesting ocean waste plastics, most particularly plastic balloons, Yoldas created the Plastic Balloon Turtle. This new breed of technospheric sea turtle has, after eating ocean plastics over many years, evolved to have a shell made of plastic balloons that can inflate, Yoldas says, when climate change forces unpredictable sea level rises.

172 _{There are many different types of plastic, including military grade and ‘enhanced’ plastics, composing}

our digital backbone and ultimately its waste. Chemically-treated synthetic plastics have replaced more ‘natural’ materials such as wood, stone, leather, glass, and metal, and are used in nearly every aspect of our digital network from fiber optic cables and device casings to server towers and transport packaging. Most of our e-related plastics are covered in highly-toxic brominated flame retardants that, when wasted, have been known to cause damage in animals and humans and to bioaccumulate, (steadily leach into)

Figure 8: Pinar Yoldas, Balloon Turtle, An Ecosystem of Excess, 2013.

Where other artists like Chris Jordan, for instance, with his images of plastic- filled albatross corpses, choose to depict the repulsive, deadly side of our e-waste excess, Yoldas provocatively highlights life. She avoids the popular Anthropocene-as-

apocalypse narrative and works instead within the ecosystemic paradigm of inter- relationality, transformation, and evolution. The creatures living in the “plastisphere” of

An Ecosystem of Excess, Yoldas says, “are life forms that can turn the toxic surplus of our

capitalistic desire into eggs, vibrations, and joy.”173

173 _{An Ecosystem of Excess http://www.pinaryoldas.info/WORK/Ecosystem-of-Excess-2014. For plastisphere,}

see "Life in the 'Plastisphere': Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris," Environmental Science &

What An Ecosystem of Excess brings to light is our implication in the pollution- ridded, waste-strewn landscapes that are altering wildlife biologies and habitats. It untangles, and in an important sense erases, the distance between our digital

consumption and its environmental consequences. Ecosystem invites us to think on the level of the system at the scale of the planetary, urging us to see how our present behaviors will accumulate into the living archives of the future.

When read alongside the text message balloon, Yoldas’s Balloon Turtle provokes a different tangible figuration of the digital-as-plastic to challenge or change our digital- material (hi)stories and subsequently our relationship—or at least our understanding of our relationship—with technology and the earth. It performs a critical act of opening that blurs the boundaries between the human, the digital, and the earth. Its narrative complicates the lovely red balloon commercial and urge us to see how our present behaviors will accumulate into the living archives of the future.

This concern about the digital’s environmental effects is showing up in a range of provocative new art works. This chapter looks at how environmentally-focused digital artworks like Yoldas’s can provoke tangible figurations to challenge or change our digital-material (hi)stories and subsequently our relationship—or at least our

understanding of our relationship—with technology and the earth. The works profiled here perform a critical act of opening that blurs the boundaries between the human, the digital, and the earth.