Data-driven art can revolve around visualizing the digital and unseen. Instead of data mining an online world, the raw material for the work, the data, was collected from literal mines! These abandoned mines in Stanhope, Weardale, UK were once used to mine lead and fluorspar.
Gold Lines Are Mineral Veins is an audio-visual installation built to highlight the vast networks that humans have carved out underground. The project was created in response to the mapping archive of the Mining Institute, Newcastle’s library. It looked at the “fuzzy edge” of the archive, materials owned by Mining Institute members that might potentially be donated and enter the archive at some point in the future.
The installation is dictated by a set of environmental and bio-data logs that were collected during an expedition of a disused lead and fluorspar mine in Stanhope, Durham. Data was gathered custom-built Arduino based data loggers, created for the project. The datalogs were used to generate an installation environment with sound and visuals directly derived from the collected data.
SuperCollider, a programming environment and language, was used to code the installation’s visualization and sonification. To create the room’s field of sound, “clouds of oscillators” were controlled by data streams floating through the installation’s 8-speaker ambisonic field (full circle surround sound).
The two 15-minute sonifications were paired with visuals crafted by blasting ultraviolet light onto fluorescent minerals and ores, such as fluorspar and uranium ore. Pitchblende and fluorospar samples were lent to the project by Colin Laidler an ex-miner who had interesting collections of minerals. The fluorescent elements of the minerals and ore flicker and pulsate under the UV light, creating complex harmonics and spatial placement dictated by the data collected during the expedition into the Stanhope mine.
The sonic effect is not unlike ambient music, but one not simply featuring melody, harmony, or synthetic drones, but a sort of mathematical expression of the planet’s inner data. Listening to the sound, one can’t help but imagine the Earth constantly sending out vibrations that scientists, musicians, and artists are only now transforming into music for the human ear. The fluorescent visuals, on the other hand, remind the audience of the luminescent qualities in Earth’s organic life and inorganic materials, which are artworks in and of themselves.
Collaborators
Sean Cotteril – Digital Media Artist and Musician
Colin Laidler – Retired Gold Miner and North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers Member, Project Advisor
Jennifer Hillyard, Library and Archives Manager, The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Mine Explorer Society, http://www.mineexplorer.org.uk/
Ben_Freeth 