Dear list, Crystelle Vu and I are pleased to present our new project, The Extinction Gong.
//------------------------------------------------------------------------> The Extinction Gong is a ceremonial automaton for the Sixth Mass Extinction, the human-induced process of planet-scale biological annihilation first formally recognised by scientists in 2014. Taking the form of a large traditional 'Chao Gong' its rear-face is fitted with a mechanism that beats to the rhythm of species extinction, estimated by eminent biologist E.O. Wilson to be about 27000 losses a year, or once every 19 minutes. The significance of this figure (and those like it by other scientists) cannot be overstated: for millennia the average 'background rate' of (plant, animal and insect) species extinction has been between 1 and 5 a year, right back to the 5th Extinction that took the dinosaurs 65M years ago. Should biologists declare a new species extinct while the Extinction Gong is active it will receive an update via a 3g link and perform a special ceremony: four strikes in quick succession alongside a text-to-speech utterance of the Latin Name of the species lost, resonating through the gong. Seen at its front, the Extinction Gong hangs in a large metal frame and bears the stark neo-primitivist image of the Extinction Symbol, the official mark of the Sixth Mass Extinction. Seen from the back however it is a work of engineering, complete with mallet, electro-magnet, audio transducer, embedded computer and 3g downlink. This diametric expresses a brutal and contradicting irony - while advances in science and technology augment the devastating impact of human endeavours over wild habitats, so are they our best means of studying and understanding it. https://extinctiongong.com/ //<-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Globally warm regards, -- Julian Oliver https://julianoliver.com https://criticalengineering.org PGP https://julianoliver.com/key.asc Beware the auto-complete life ______________________________________________ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
