Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz's Breath Eaters
Considering The Breath Eaters, Marina Zurkow's recent collaboration with James Schmitz
Dear Friends,
I’ve been thinking for some time now about how change happens, what drives social and political changes, what individuals can do (and what they can’t). This is the first of what I hope will be several attempts to think this through in relation to particular works of art and the artists who made them.
Full disclosure: Marina Zurkow, who I talk about in this letter, is a friend. I plan to invite her in to a conversation here about art, change, oceans, and the more-than-human world. Look for that in the coming weeks.
Thanks to all who have subscribed! I appreciate you coming on this adventure with me.
—Sal
Hawai'i is Burning (Even Though it’s Not)
Picture the earth, blue marble from space. Now picture it as if drawn in WWII-era illustration, propaganda-style, with white snakes of global winds swirling across the oceans and land masses. Peer in. The winds are carrying something, a cloud of particulates emitted by tiny factories and fires, moving across the planet and up over the poles. At first it might seem like a picture painted on glass, but the globe slowly rotates, continents and oceans passing.
Step back. The globe is a screen, a screen mounted into a small square box and affixed to the wall, overlapping a big AI-generated mural of a tempest—clouds and dark whirlwinds with unresolvable fragments of wind turbines breaking about in the sky and tumbling into the fields below. The words WORLD WIND are rendered in warped yet emphatic letterforms. We are standing in the vestibule of Marina Zurkow’s show, World Wind, at bitforms gallery in New York.
The centerpiece of the show is on three big screens leaning against each other, a freestanding sculpture. It’s called The Breath Eaters, and it enlarges parts of the globe in the entrance.* The Breath Eaters is a piece of software (a collaboration with artist-technologist James Schmitz) generatively animating major sources of airborne particulates that stream across the globe, carried on winds.
Each screen The Breath Eaters shows a section of the slowly turning earth, an earth where continents are sand-beige and the sea is blue and there are no national borders. It is the fantasy of a globe seen from the edges of space, just close enough to perceive the swirl of winds across the planet.
The globe is animated with factories, fires, and wind-borne rivers of particulate pollution. The piece uses data from the World Resources Institute’s global fossil fuel plant database to locate every emitting plant above a certain size—these are shown as groups of red-ringed smokestacks and chunky buildings all emitting streamers of red-brown pixels. In some areas, flames lick upwards, visualizations of heat sources perceptible from space—data sourced from NASA. They, too, emit streamers of pollution. The pollutants are carried around the globe on winds modeled using more realtime data from NOAA. There’s no directly available information for the particulates themselves—the work extrapolates from the location and scale of the emitting sources and the near-realtime patterns of winds.
This model of world-spanning winds makes immediately visible that what is emitted in one place affects other places, hundreds or thousands of miles away.
I circle the screens and my eye is caught by the Hawaiian islands, tiny in the vast area of the blue Pacific. A flame is undulating up from the island of Hawai‘i, as if the island was a candle or a tiny bonfire. Maybe it is the vulnerability implied by the small size of the islands that catches me, or the familiarity of their shapes, since I spent my adolescence living there and saw them depicted constantly.
Hawai‘i, of course, isn’t literally burning. The flames represent heat—enough heat that it can be detected by satellites. The flames I see on other parts of the globe—in the Amazon, over a large area across Central Africa—most likely do represent fires, seasonal agricultural burns. Hawai‘i’s heat comes instead from the eruption of Mauna Loa. It’s not something that humans cause or control, yet it, too, offers its pollutants to the winds. Hawai‘i isn’t imperiled, and its plumes don’t seem to reach any continents, but seeing it produces a stab of feeling, of tenderness. Like anyone might, I look for my familiar places on the globe, and my feeling attaches to them.
Mid-December, Zurkow posted a short video clip of The Breath Eaters on Instagram; she had taken the video with her phone, a quick way to to introduce the show, which was about to open. If you turn on the audio, you can hear the sound of saws and the noise of installation in the background.
As it happened, the part of the earth that Zurkow filmed with her phone was centered on the Indian subcontinent, with an area that included parts of Russia, China, and Southeast Asia. A large number of factories cluster in the eastern parts of India and Bangladesh; parts of China are almost completely obscured by factories and particulates.
Reaction was swift and angry. The clip has been viewed more than three million times, liked by fifty-thousand people, and received hundreds of comments. Most of the comments were complaints that India and China were being singled out as sources of pollution while Europe and North America were being apparently given a free pass. A number pointed out that the US and other countries offshore their pollution by outsourcing their manufacturing.
The centering of India was accidental—the piece is global—but as Zurkow conceded in a recent gallery talk, the work doesn’t currently capture economic flows in the way it captures energy and particulates. She and Schmitz are thinking about this for a future version.
For my own part, I was struck by the energy and emotion of the responses.
In conversations with other artists who are committed to social action, to change-making, one thing that comes up is the relation of art and feeling. There is the idea that changes in society are preceded by changes in feeling—that feeling comes before policy—and that art concerns itself with feeling. There is a hope that art experience can give rise to shifts in feeling which can give rise to actions (by which we mean political actions). Everyone knows that these links are fragile, that outcomes are uncertain—sometimes these equations seem ridiculous, or futile, or impossible—and yet, for artists, what else is there?
The way Zurkow puts it is: “[…] there are many roles that artists occupy in terms of addressing environmental atrocities, ecocide, grief, climate change, and environmental connection-making. These roles range from explicit activism—getting people charged up to make change, to the subtler concerns […]: changing affect, changing the way we feel, changing the paradigm and the values in which we live.”
But experience is wild, feeling is wild. Since we all bring unknowable circumstances, memories, associations, and emotions into whatever we see, feeling isn’t something that an artist can predict or control. Is the feeling that Zurkow accidentally tapped into the wrong feeling? I would say not, even if it is based in part on a misunderstanding of the piece. The anger that her short video ignited was already there, already large and important and pointing towards the need for real climate and economic justice as part of any set of solutions we imagine.
We often know or guess, looking at a work of art, what we are meant to feel. What we actually feel rarely conforms to this. So our experience is split into layers, sensory layers, layers of interpretation or understanding (which include ideas about the artist’s intention), layers of our own idiosyncratic experience.
Watching The Breath Eaters I feel dismay at the concentration of pollutants accumulating over China; I see the beauty of the winds swirling across the globe; I peer in with fascinated curiosity at the factories and flames. Why are they in these places and not others? I see Hawai‘i burning and I experience an indefinable movement of the heart. It has nothing to do with Zurkow’s aims, but I feel the burning flames of my own adolescence rising up.
So it’s not hard to imagine that anyone looking at a cluster of polluting factories near their home city will feel something beyond the question of global empathy. The climate is shared by all, but the causes, effects, remedies, and burdens of change fall unequally. Unfairness and injustice naturally spark anger; this anger deserves attention.
And yet what Zurkow says is also true, and I’ll give her the last word: “If carbon has been extracted and liberated to roam the globe on the winds, why is the world of beings (human, plant, animal) constrained by national boundaries, walled in and walled out? It is our hope that a near-live data stream of pollution’s transnationalism will give rise to empathy in viewers—this map can look very different with planetary action.”
Marina Zurkow’s exhibition in collaboration with James Schmitz is on view at bitforms gallery through February 18, 2023.
*The small globe at the entrance to the show isn’t for sale, or listed as a piece in the catalog. It displays a one-hour recording of The Breath Eaters in a full-earth view.