Western wind
JOEL ONG’S AEOLIAN TRACES
Aeolian Traces
Currents artist Joel Ong’s Aeolian Traces blends ideas about wind and human migration around the globe. He arranges a 16-speaker sound system and an eight-channel ventilator (motor fan) setup into an “ambisonic sphere.” The immersive (but not interactive) experience within this virtual environment offers soft wind sounds synchronized with soft breezes, whispered narratives in many languages, and a visual component that portrays the documented movements of populations.
Ong is assistant professor in information design and creative data visualization in the department of computational arts at York University in Toronto. For this project, he harvested data from census databanks and from an annual report on how much freedom citizens of each country have to move around with their passports. That migration data “is basically driving the sound and the visuals as well as the kind of physical perturbation of air in the space with fans,” Ong said. “I wanted to think about human migration as a kind of utopic free movement of people, almost like you feel the wind move across. There are no restrictions to it, and that metaphor for me was really poignant, especially in 2015 with all the stuff [civil war and refugee crises] that was happening in the Middle East. And it’s still going on.”
The relative freedoms of peoples are subtly represented in Aeolian Traces. “There are definitely moments when you can see and feel congestion taking place, and most of it in 2015 was centered around the Middle East.”
The work relates back to Ong’s 2014 piece Aeolus Notification System. That was the first in a series of digital artworks about wind, specifically “the idea of the wind being able to carry not you physically but carry your thoughts, your memories, and perhaps your hopes across large distances,” he said. “When I did Aeolus Notification System, I was living in Seattle and I had a mishap in my family in Singapore, and I really wanted go back and I couldn’t. I made this prototype that was a small cart fitted with a GPS device that would slowly, painfully slowly, move in the direction of home.” His newest pursuit is the Alien Microbes Project. “I’m extending my interest in wind into this crazyass project where we send weather balloons into the air with Petri dishes and air filters to try to catch microbes in the air. There’s a particular microbe we’re looking for, and we’ve searched in Buffalo, Toronto, and Los Angeles so far. It’s an ice-nucleating bacteria that is implicated in weather modifications. There are huge amounts of bacteria that we actually send up from the ground. They are basically just passengers, and at some point they’re like, ‘Well, we can ride with wind,’ and they live in the clouds and they clusterize and make rain or snow.” Ong said that piece likely will materialize as a bio-art sculpture. “But also, a large part of it is computational, so we’ll try to do some data visualization with this. It will be a living sculpture, but also playing into what I’ve been working on, which is computational graphics.” In his research into the history of aeolian instruments, he discovered Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit priest and the innovator of the aeolian harp; and Gordon Monahan’s 1984 piece Long Aeolian Piano. Ong described this realm as “actually a really interesting transcendental and spiritual experience that involves often this desire to talk to or communicate with the spiritual world and God. On the merging of the human and global scale, one of the ways that it’s so poignant and profound but overlooked is simply breathing. The breath that comes out of your mouth essentially becomes wind and can be translocated anywhere. It’s a great reminder that you aren’t that far from home.”
Joel Ong: Concept art for Aeolian Traces, 2017, new media installation
“The breath that comes out of your mouth essentially becomes wind and can be translocated anywhere. It’s a great reminder that you aren’t that far from home.” — artist Joel Ong