PLASTIC OCEANS, A PHOTOGRAPHERS PERSPECTIVE

Artist Mandy Barker’s at times kaleidoscopic, at times otherworldly photographic collages of plastic marine debris became a hit before she even graduated art school. She credits her technique for awakening the viewers who have been “anaesthetized to facts”.

Perhaps Mandy Barker’s photo series ‘SOUP’ needs clarification. They portray the marine waste that has captivated and appalled the artist for over two decades. Technically speaking the term ‘SOUP’ is used to describe what is an unpleasant by-product of our day-to-day plastic consumption, a toxic concoction that is swirling around in today’s oceans.

It was almost 20 years ago that Barker first began to take notice of the waste that was being washed up on the shoreline, initially she supposed it was rubbish people had left on the beach. It was only later, she says, that she realized it wasn’t coming directly from the land — but that “they [the pieces of waste] were actually coming from the sea”. To start with, it was small things that began to increasingly intermingle with the natural objects that Barker was used to collecting. She noticed small man-made objects — predominately plastic single-use items, and then she began to see larger items washed up.

“I realized it was getting really bad when I first saw a fridge-freezer and a car and a TV on the beach,”

Barker began to make connections, to ask herself how the things got there. She soon learnt, from local fisherman on the east coast of the UK, that regular dumping went on out at sea. She also understood that waste entered the sea from rivers and all this was in addition to the general littering of the beaches. Barker’s research continued her research online and in person.

As Barker pursued a career in photography she became more and more convinced that the plastic-waste issue was a serious concern and that it needed to be documented.

Soft power probably sums up her work and method best.

Unassuming in person, Barker, a mother of three, is far from the anarchic diva photographer we have come to accept when we think of an internationally recognized art photographer. She came to professional photography relatively late in life after initially having worked in graphic design. Her skill in visual communication is clearly evident in her carefully crafted work. This skill allied to her passion has helped to bring the issue of plastic pollution to the public domain, which, in turn, has brought her worldwide recognition and success. Published worldwide in magazines and journals ranging from Time to Wired, the Financial Times to the Guardian, Mandy is also the recipient of a multitude of national and international awards. Yet she baulks at the idea of being in the limelight or being celebrated. She certainly prefers to let her work speak for itself as she says “I’m not naturally one to stand on a stage and shout about it.”

“When I first started taking images of waste they were essentially documentary pictures. I just took pictures of how I found the waste on the beach in-situ — people weren’t really interested in the pictures,” she says.

“It didn’t really hold their attention for very long, so I realized that I needed to create something that had a longer lasting impact.”

How does a photographer bring our attention to what is now considered to be one of the most alarming environmental issues of the day?

As she developed her technique, Barker drew inspiration from several photographers, several of which had scaled back the background to allow the viewer to focus on the object at hand. Edward Weston’s ‘Pepper Series’ and Cornelia Parker’s feather photograms pitched objects against a black background. “I was intrigued [by] how the object took all the focus with the background essentially removed,” Barker says. Once Barker managed to remove all noise from around objects and have people focus on them, she began to seriously consider the texts that would accompany them. Here she was inspired by photographer Simon Norfolk, whose landscapes are at first attractive, however when they are combined with his captions they give a truly powerful message of what he’s trying to represent. It is the context that the captions bring that truly convey what lays behind his photographs.

Eventually, she arrived at the intricate photo collages that make up SOUP, which became her final project during her MA in Photography. ‘SOUP’ soon gained global interest. Although only a student project, the way in which she had chosen to communicate the ecological threat of marine waste seemed to resonate strongly and Barker’s work was soon published worldwide. She had managed to capture the viewers’ attention, as she had hoped for, and used the caption below to give “shocking, hard-hitting facts about the environment and marine plastic”.

The viewer may not initially be aware that the images are of trash and is far less aware of the message behind the image until drawn in. As Barker explains, “people often become anaesthetized to facts and figures and there aren’t really many visual images of this particular area”. It was always Barker’s hope her work — the visual element, along with the science and the statistics, would combine to create more of an awareness of the situation.

Now through gallery representation, fine art prints (a percentage of the sales of which she donates to charities such as ‘Plastic Free Seas’) and giving talks Mandy’s message is reaching a wider audience. Most recently she undertook new projects, one — PENALTY — involving a social media element. Footballs which had been washed on shores from Kenya to Guadeloupe and Scotland were collected and sent to her to document. The project affirmed Mandy’s belief that she was on the right path and that people were concerned and interested in the plight of the oceans. SHOAL, another recent project dealt with waste collected during Japanese Tsunami Debris Expedition in June 2012, the work here reflected time Mandy spent in the area of Fukushima seeing personal objects washed up and considering lives lost as a result of the natural disaster. Although at the time it became less about the scientific side of plastic pollution, ultimately Mandy feels the work reflects the magnitude of both the personal and scientific side of the destruction.

It is hard for Barker to know whether her work is having any real effect. However, at her exhibitions, Barker has left surveys for the visitor to fill in. The numbers show that more than 80 percent of the viewers were previously unaware of the problem of what ends up in the oceans and on the beaches, and 87 percent of respondents said that they would think more about what they bought and what they used as a result. Barker emphasizes “I don’t create artworks for artworks’ sake”.

The original version of this article was published in the printed and online magazine Twentyfour7 (2015) a stakeholder magazine for Wärtsilä.

Mandy Barker has continued bring great awareness to the issue of marine plastic pollution. ‘Beyond Drifting’, her latest work and publication, have been highly acclaimed worldwide.

Plamacina retroversta ic. III Specimen collected from Cohb shoreline, Cove of Cork, Ireland (White plastic horse, 3) from Beyond Drifting

WHERE THE FUTURE LIES

KTH Royal Institute of Technology has served as one of Europe’s key centres of innovation and intellectual talent for almost two hundred years. Recognised as Sweden’s most prestigious technical university, KTH is also the country’s oldest and largest. Education and research spans from natural sciences to all the branches of engineering and includes architecture, industrial management and urban planning.

In 2016 I wrote the research articles for the yearbooks for both the School of Electrical Engineering and for the School of Industrial Management.

School of Electrical Engineering articles:

• Independent communication between robots
• Automising stem cell research
• The algorithm at the heart of automated truck safety
• 'Human organs on a chip' technology
• Sustainable power development

SCANIA - READY FOR THE RISE OF ETHANOL

14 DECEMBER 2017

An increase in the production of ethanol for use by the global transport industry could reduce worldwide carbon emissions dramatically, says a new scientific study. Scania already has the sustainable solutions to take advantage of this.

It has long been considered that ethanol is the most viable biofuel for use in heavy goods vehicles. It is produced in larger quantities than any other biofuel and, it has been suggested, with the right management it could in time replace oil.

“Ethanol is widely available,” says Urban Wästljung from Scania Public and Sustainable Affairs. “And the industry knows how to manage ethanol production sustainably. Of course it is generally more expensive than crude oil, but it has strong carbon reduction potential and it is cost-effective in reducing CO2.”

Scania has been producing vehicles that can run on ethanol for more than 30 years. “Scania has a technology which makes it possible for ED95, which is ethanol blended with an ignition improver, to run a diesel engine,” says Wästljung.

Paris will prohibit the use of diesel

And as sustainability becomes an imperative for business models, ethanol is likely to become an increasingly in-demand energy solution. The city of Paris for example will prohibit the use of diesel by 2020.

The most efficient raw material used in the production of ethanol is sugarcane and the world’s most sustainable sugarcane producer is Brazil, which is also widely believed to have the world’s first sustainable biofuel economy. There is also a major potential for using residual material from sugarcane production.

As far back as 1976 the Brazilian government made it compulsory for the transportation industry to blend anhydrous ethanol with gasoline. There are now no longer any light vehicles in Brazil running on pure gasoline.

Ethanol produced from sugarcane is more efficient than maize ethanol, which is largely produced in the US, and generates only 14 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions of petroleum, says Amanda DeSouza, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois and the University of São Paulo and one of the authors of a new scientific study published in the Nature Climate Change journal.

Advocates sugarcane production

The report also states that sugarcane production in Brazil for conversion to ethanol could reduce current global carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 5.6 percent. The report therefore advocates the conversation of hundreds of thousands of square miles (more than the combined land area of Texas and California) of land in Brazil to sugarcane.

Sugar cane field Araraquara, Brazil Photo: Gustav Lindh 2016Gustav Lindh

This, the report suggests, could be done without touching environmentally sensitive areas, while carbon-related costs of converting the land have been included in the analysis.

Jonas Strömberg, Scania’s Director of Sustainable Solutions, adds that Europe could also play a bigger part in ethanol production. “There are over 25 million hectares of abandoned farmland that could be used for further ethanol and biodiesel production,” he says. “This would greatly enhance the EU’s energy security by replacing oil imports from unstable and non-democratic countries. It could also help ethanol replace almost all of the diesel used in the heavy-duty transport sector. Technology is not the problem.”

CONTINUING THE COMMUNICATION REVOLUTION

Remember the time before smartphones and ‘mobile solutions’, before all the talk of autonomous systems and the Internet of Things? Remember when there was no 2, 3 or 4G? Remember wires, everywhere.

"I remember when, perhaps twenty years ago, what we were doing here was seen as interesting but too expensive to develop." Reflects Mikael Skoglund, Head of the Department of Information Science and engineering and vice dean of the school of Electrical Engineering at KTH.

For the past twenty years both he and his colleague, Professor of Signal Processing and program director for the MSc program in Wireless Systems, Mats Bengtsson have been performing both theoretical as well as experimental research, using numerous tools from information, communication, and coding theory to signal processing, machine learning and statistical physics to further develop wireless networks.

Skoglund and Bengtsson along with colleagues and students have worked to develop a technology we have come to take for granted, a technology which becomes more reliable, trusted, able, efficient and capable with each new ‘generation’. By the time we arrived at ‘3G’ enabled mobile devices they had capabilities that made it possible for us to access everything, almost anywhere. The wireless networking capability gave birth to the “smartphone”. It was easy to play games, send videos and images. Microblogging and sharing numerous selfies had become part of our everyday lives. This was all made possible from rapid, constant data transfer.

The next leap in wireless technology, 4G, became known as ‘mobile broadband anywhere and everywhere’ and it changed the atomic unit of the web from images to videos. Skoglund and Bengtsson, as well as colleagues and students, were involved from the start and between 2000 and 2010 they worked on 4G development. Their work was given a boost when in 2004 the European Commission began the project Wireless World Initiative New Radio (WINNER) whose aim it was to define the fourth generation radio standard. WINNER united 4G industry and researchers from Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. By 2010 4G was a reality and the European Commission decided to invest 18 million Euros in the further development of the technology. Overall, the years 2007-2013 saw the EU invest more than €700 million into research on future networks, half of which was allocated to wireless technologies contributing to the development of 4G and beyond 4G networks.

The work on 4G has been a resounding success. Aside from download and streaming speeds, it has been a success from a societal point of view. It has led to a decrease in the digital divide between urban and rural communities. Worldwide standardisation has meant the use of a single technology from across the world without changes between Europe the United States and Japan- areas which previously all operated on separate systems. The internet on our phones is now taken for granted, and mobile internet usage, in 2016, surpassed desktop usage for the first time. 80 percent of time spent on social media is

spent on mobile devices and social media itself has been supercharged from Snapchat stories to the 8bn video views on Facebook per day.

When asked about their role in the development of this disruptive and enabling technology Skoglund explains that it was, “Through our research, networking and working on the huge European projects that we contributed.”

Looking to the future we can glimpse just how the work done by Bengtsson, Skoglund and the EE School continues to have an impact. Both 4G and now 5G have been influenced not only by the work of Skoglund and Bengtsson but also by their former Phd students, now working with major telecommunication companies such as Ericsson and Huawei. Already in the early 2010’s Skoglund and Bengtsson were involved in the development of the new 5G technology. WINNER was soon followed by another European project, the Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for Twenty-twenty (2020) Information Society (METIS). METIS, a consortium of 29 partners focusing on developing a concept for 5G was coordinated by Ericsson whereas WINNER was led by Siemens. This time the technical objective was to develop a concept for the future mobile and wireless communications system that would support the connected information society.

“5G will be different again,” Says Skoglund. “If you browse the internet over the phone a two-second delay can be okay, but if you wish to control a robot over wireless or an autonomous car, the requirements on real-time and reliable communication are much tougher. 4G can’t deliver that.”

We should be in no doubt that 5G technology will be transformative. It will affect most industries, and will supercharge virtual and artificial reality. The Department of Information Science and Engineering has made its mark on the way in which we live our lives today and will continue to have an influence on how we will live them tomorrow.

This article was originally published in KTH a piece of history

https://www.antonywrites.com/home/2017/12/29/continuing-the-communication-revolution