[spectre] // Project announcement: HARVEST //

Julian Oliver julian at julianoliver.com
Sat Sep 16 20:26:53 CEST 2017


Dear list, 

I'm pleased to announce my new work 'HARVEST', recently commissioned by 
Konstmuseet i Skövde, Sweden:

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HARVEST is a work of critical engineering and computational climate art. It uses
wind-energy to mine cryptocurrency, the earnings of which are used as a source
of funding for climate-change research.

Taking the form of a 2m wind turbine with environmental sensors, weatherproof
computer and 4G uplink, HARVEST ‘feeds’ from two primary symptoms of our
changing climate: wind gusts and storms. It does this by transforming wind
energy into the electricity required to meet the demanding task of mining
cryptocurrency (here Zcash), a decentralised process where computers are
financially rewarded for their work maintaining and verifying a public
transaction ledger known as the blockchain. Rather than filling the digital
wallet of the artist, all rewards earned by the HARVEST mining machine are paid
out as donations to non-profit climate change research organisations such that
they can better study this planetary-scale challenge.

Acting as a fully functional prototype beyond a media-art context, it is
envisaged hundreds of such HARVEST nodes could be deployed in the windiest parts
of the world, together generating large sums of supplementary funding for
climate-change NGOs in a time where climate science itself is under siege from
the fossil-fuelled interests of governments and corporations.

    https://julianoliver.com/output/harvest

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Globally warm regards,

-- 
Julian Oliver
https://julianoliver.com
https://criticalengineering.org
PGP https://julianoliver.com/key.asc
Beware the auto-complete life

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