C O 2 * [art + sustainability]: HeHe: On Clouds and Trains

Nuage Vert (Helsinki, 2008)

Founded in Paris by Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen, HeHe is an artists’ collective that explores our relationship with our surroundings with art work that results from the rethinking of the technological systems that are dichotomizing our built and natural environments.

Their work is not bound to a single genre of art as they switching from interactive / digital art (that requires the participation of spectator in order to the art to achieve its purpose) to traditional / contemporary art (in which the interaction between the art work and viewers is a mental experience.) But whether producing digital or contemporary art work, HeHe maintains a single aim: to highlight the impact of our daily activities on our environment.

Aiming at making highly visible the interaction between individuals and their environment, HeHe’s have been producing art “devices” - such as light panels that react to the sound of pedestrians in a sidewalk, or a screen with a matrix of LED lights that react to visitors breath (Twilight, 2000), lamps that change colors according to the amount of smoke in a room (Smoking Lamp, 2005), or, and other works - in which viewers participate in some way by providing an input in order to determine the outcome They are generally computer-based art work and frequently rely on sensors, which gauge things such as temperature, motion, sound frequencies and the proximity of viewers, that the makers have programmed in order to elicit responses based on participant action.

Twilight, 2000, photo HeHe. Installation realised with the technical help of Michael Feild and initially conceived with Stephanie Hankey, Marcus Gosling and Manuel Mercadal.

The movement onto a paper propeller triggers a wave of light and sound across the otherwise dark space. The force of the propagated air dynamically determines the sound and light: a very soft blow will gently lead to one image change whilst a harder blow will carry a faster tide of images and light flow.(a)

Twilight 2000 at Eleven, (organised by TCA) London

Twilight 2000 (detail)

Smoking Lamp (2006)

The Smoking Lamp is an object that amplifies the personal choice of smoking or not smoking in a public environment. The lamp is deliberately paradoxical, at once inviting the public to smoke whilst at the same time signalling their transgression. Designed as a funnel that terminates with a ring of light, the lamp changes from a bright white to a warm pink if it detects nicotine smoke beneath it. The red hand and face gestures of the smokers become the focus of attention while the non smoking public, cast as the spectator, watches the extraordinary phenomenon that was first described by 17th century Europeans - before the word was verbalised - as “drinking smoke”. The smoking Lamp is part of a larger artistic research into the question on how to generate real-time consciousness of air pollution. (b)

link to VIDEO: Smoking Lamp (2006)

While highlighting the correlation between the insatiable human demand for new sources of energy (and the pollution associated to them) and the ever increasing fragility of our natural ecosystems, HeHe have produced art installations that illustrate recent catastrophes caused by the exploitation of the main energy resources from the industrial age: oil and nuclear energy. Is There a Horizon in the Deepwater (2011) stages the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in 2010, while Fleur de Lys (2009), a nuclear plant plunged in an aquarium, evokes the dangers of atomic energy. Here, one naturally recalls the Fukushima disaster in 2011, but there is also a manner of premonition: at its origin, the piece was conceived as being part of a series devoted to clouds (pollution) generated by human activity. The title Fleur de Lys harks back to the stylized form of the smoke plume emitted by the cooling tower, but also symbolically refers to France, a country 80% dependent on the atom for its energy needs. (1)

Is there a horizon in the deep water? (2011)

A recreation in miniature, of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster that took place on the Deep Water Horizon oil rig, which exploded and sunk causing the largest off shore oil spill in US history. The performance took place in the water of Jesus Green Lido, Cambridge, UK as part of the Cambridge Science Festival on 17th March 2011 and was commissioned by Invisible Dust (c)

Is there a horizon in the deep water (2011)

Fleur de Lys (2009)

Fleur de Lys installation focuses on the multi-faceted cultural impact and implications of man-made clouds. In this installation, the atomic mushroom cloud takes a central point as a frightening and yet highly aesthetic symbol of technical achievement. The scale model simulates a nuclear meltdown. The cooling tower of an atomic power plant dominates a miniaturized post-industrial landscape, all of which is immersed in a water-filled aquarium. At regular intervals, a slowly spreading cloud created by a controlled manipulation of liquids emerges from the tower’s chimney. A pre-programmed sound and lighting score accompanies this miniature catastrophe and the hourly simulated explosion enters the realm of the theatrical and cinematic, through associations with Hollywood films such as Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow or Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

In Fleur de Lys, miniaturization and spectacle go hand in hand. (d)

Fleur de Lys (2009)

link to VIDEO: Fleur de Lys (2009)

In 2008, HeHe put light on the story of air pollution itself with the urban intervention Nuage Vert. It consisted of a large scale environmental artwork in which a laser projection illuminated a cloud of vapor emissions produced by a power plant in Helsinki. The shape of the laser image followed a thermal image of the emissions, visualizing the amount of heat emitted whilst the size of the projection made visible power consumption in the local area. Working in partnership with the power station, it created a beautiful spectacle in the sky, helping to make visible complex facts about the environment. The power station selected was close to a residential area and local residents were invited on one evening to switch off from the grid by turning off all electrical appliances and coming out onto the streets to view the the Nuage Vert laser projection, which grew bigger as residents consumed less electricity.

In HeHe’s projects, cloud forms have been used as a visual metaphor for and to aestheticise emissions. As Helen Evans wrote of Nuage Vert:

“[I]t doesn’t offer a simple moralistic message, but rather tries to confront the city dweller with an evocative and aesthetic spectacle, which is open to interpretation and challenges ordinary perception. Turning a factory emission cloud green, inevitably, leads to questions being asked. It shifts the discourse about climate change and carbon emissions from abstract immaterial models based on the individual, to the tangible reality of urban life.”
[…]
“Of course, there is an element of fiction, in asking people to give up energy to feed Nuage Vert, as if the energy saved is then transferred onto the cloud. And the idea of reading information into a dynamic moving cloud requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. As a transmitting architecture, Nuage Vert conveys multiple ideas: could this green cloud be a toxic cloud or an emblem for the collective effort of the local community? The meaning is left open for each and all to decide, and will depend upon the level of engagement.” (2)

Nuage Vert (Helsinki, 2008)

Nuage Vert is based on the idea that public forms can embody an ecological project, materialising environmental issues so that they become a subject within our collective daily lives. Its material, collective and aesthetic dimension distinguishes it from other approaches. A city scale light installation onto the ultimate icon of industrial pollution, alerts the public, generates discussion and can persuade people to change patterns of consumption. (e)

Nuage Vert (Helsinki, 2008)

Closer to the sphere of more traditional/contemporary art forms -- wherein the interaction of the spectator is a mental event and that, perhaps, is meant to ignite paradigm shift through psychological activity -- is HeHe’s art work based on transportation infrastructure and urban mobility. With a humorous attitude, rather than a moralizing one, HeHe reinvest technology involved in transportation infrastructure – whose link with environmental issues are undeniable.

Ingeniously, they deconstruct a highly complex technological system in order to unveil the core invention and its initial strengths and potentials. By doing so, HeHe believes to make possible to reinvent older technologies – and make it more suitable to respond to current social and environmental needs. For this, they use an artistic process they call reverse cultural engineering: starting from the original concept of the invention, they re-imagine the design decisions that were at some point in history considered unfavorably, but that could be equally valid for tomorrow. It is a clever conceptual hybrid between détournement, re-appropriation and a sort of fantasy design archaeology.(3) (4)

Resulting from such a method, for instance, is HeHe’s Train Project which is a series of rail art vehicles that ride on abandoned rail tracks and were deployed on railway tracks around the world, from Tapis Volant in Istanbul (2005), to The H-Line in New York (2007), Metronome in Paris (2012) and M-Blem in Liverpool (2012). More recent work from this series is the Radeau de Sauvetage (2013), which is both performance and prototype for a sailing raft that rides on rail tracks. These site specific vehicles use abandoned rail tracks as an open air laboratory for art and transport experiments. The Train Project piggy-backs on abandoned infrastructure, using leftovers from the centralized machine ensemble of rail transport of a bygone era. (5)

HeHe’s dream is to go beyond art and become a public transport service. The Train Project aims to operate a permanent passenger railway service called Metronome, running between two stations on the Petite Ceinture, the mythic, circular, abandoned rail track encircling the Paris city, where the project began in 2003.

How can we “dream”, as artists, about something so complex as a public transport system, including its infrastructure, vehicles, tickets, passengers and its effect on the environment? The answer might lie in the words of Goethe: “Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”