 The next talk is called Twilight Broadcasting. Ice sculpture is the title of our next talk. Peggy Silop, our speaker, is an intermediate artist and computer scientist. In the next 20 minutes, she will talk about her ice, light, and sound insulation, which is an ongoing project she started in 2009. Ice is melting. The drops are producing data. First, she started by just counting them. Now the drops can also produce sound via MIDI. She will talk about her motivation and the development of the project. And her motivation is the global ice melting. And how her installation brings this abstract knowledge as a central experience to the people. So now I will give a warm welcome applause for Peggy Silop. The stage is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the introduction. Yeah, well, you already said it. I'm an intermediate artist. And I'm going to speak about my ongoing Twilight project. I'm doing it since 2009. And yeah, let's start by the motivation. So this is all about ice and it's all about ice melting. And look at the global situation. So if you see, like, ice covers 10% of Earth's surface. And actually, it's disappearing rapidly. And so what does that mean? If you look, for example, to Alaska, since Protestant glacier, how it looked in 1917 and how it looked like 15 years ago, the weather was thick ice. Now there's weather. Or you don't have to go to Alaska. You can even stay in the Alps. Here, the Italian Carreza glacier, how it looks in 1933. And nowadays in 2012, there's nothing but stone, actually, to see. Or you could look to a glacier in Austria. There you see it. There's a lake. It's actually also another point that this frozen, like usually in summer, it's always big melting. And it gives drinking water. It serves as a drinking water reservoir for regions. And for example, this glacier, this vernacte ferner in Austria, he lost in the past 20 years about 110 million of water, a cubic meter of water. And this is actually an amount, which is huge. I mean, I'm going to speak about a lot of numbers which are incredibly huge. When I did the research for this talk, I was really kind of shocked because I never went so deep into the numbers. OK, let's start with this actually small number. It's just 110 million cubic meter. And this is an amount, which is, for example, it's the same like the drinking water region Munich uses within one year. And this is what this glacier lost in the last 20 years. And like this, there are a lot of glaciers in the Alps and it's about 5,000 glaciers losing all the time actually on Volumina. So it's that half of in the next years, the half of these glaciers will be gone actually. It's really a tremor already. So science tries to somehow count and measure how this goes on. And especially in the smaller tongues of the glaciers, where the ice is not so thick anymore, they're losing a lot of weight and it's all melting into water. For example, this one, this findet glacier in Swiss, he lost in this tongue. It's called 25 to 30 meters in the last 15 years. And in the bigger ice regions, just 3.5 meters. So if you look at the Arctic Ocean, this is North Pole. That's how it looked in 1979. And that's how it looks now. I mean, it's a huge area just disappearing. Or if you see at the permafrost, not everything is frozen, it's just ice. It's also like the Earth is frozen. It's permafrost. And actually, it is in Russia. You have here some 1.6 of the actually of the whole Earth surface is permafrost, not only in Russia, sorry. And all this is now melting. And it's giving free a lot of methane gas. And this is even worse for the global heating than other influences. And this goes on. And especially for the population regions, it's really a drama because all the infrastructures, like buildings, streets, pipelines, they all get damaged because the water is just flowing away, everything. And even Putin is saying, we have to do everything to stop the climatic change. And this is going on in the last year. More and more fast, we have to realize. So if you look at the global state of the glaciers from 1950 to 2020, you see that at the beginning, this was also just before still a bit, that there's also a bit of growing in the winter time. A bit more ice was produced, but this doesn't happen anymore. In the last 30 years, it's going really more and more fast, all the smelting. And if you look at the, it's also interesting, I think, is that this data is free and open available. I have some link down there, and everybody can actually easily some stats like this. So if you look at the global ice loss of glaciers, it's 400 billion tons since 1994. In Greenland, in Iceland, it's 294 billion tons, I mean, every year. In Arctic, every decade, it's about 13.1% losing. And Antarctica, every year, 127 billion tons. That's crazy. And actually, I had a look for the surface. Antarctica and Antarctica together, they have the same amount like South America. So it's a continent. I mean, when you look at the globe, usually you have just this white line up and down, and it looks small. But actually, it's a continent, a big continent, much bigger than Europe, for example. But to break it down to our small reality, let's say, OK, let's think Berlin is a world. And this is the district in Berlin. And when you say, OK, one tenth would be ice. It would be, for example, all Reinigendorf. Or you could even take the dark pink one. This is Mütter and Neukölln. This is ice, nowadays, on the Earth still. And this is vanishing. Can you imagine? It gives an impression of how big the impact on the global climatic situation is. And actually, we have already this experience. We don't even think so much about it. Because, for example, in former times, like 100 years ago, it was normal that there was ice harvest, like the lakes were frozen every winter. And there were pieces of ice that were cut out. I mean, nowadays, nobody could imagine something like this. And it was quite normal to put this into serres. And there would be cooling, severe oil, some alum. So this is actually interesting, because we don't think, nowadays, anymore, that we could use cold energy and try to spare cold energy. We use just fridge. And it needs energy. And that's normal. Nobody thinks about it. We could do something about it. For example, when I came to Berlin, it wasn't the late 80s, there were still like these old buildings. And you would always have some small room in the kitchen where you could be a bit more cool, usually below the window, where you could just store your food. It would be a bit fresh and cool. And nowadays, all these kind of things vanished. And we use energy for cooling. That's the normal thing. And before then, there was also ice production from the 20s on in Berlin. And yeah, this was how it looks like. Everybody got a piece of ice. And actually, there's still ice production in Berlin. And I use this for my installations also. And I want to now tell a bit about the story, about how I use the ice and what I did from now on. All these QR codes are giving a link to some videos of works I did. But I put them also in the next slides. So this was the first production I did. It was called Polar. It was the Ice Sound Dance Performance in 2009, Berlin Food Fabric. And yeah, we were dancing, making an electronic sound, and having these eyes. And actually, when I switched on the light at the end of the stage of the show, I saw that these different lights in the ice were really completely fascinating. And I thought, OK, I want to work with them. I'm also a light artist. And I found it really interesting to bring light into a sculpture, which is also central, very essential impact. Because this ice is cold, we can touch it to feel also somehow the power of the cold. And it's also beautiful, and it will also vanish. So it has a very emotional impact on the people who are experiencing it. I don't know if it works for the streaming, the same thing. The same way, I mean. So next time, I put some ice and carried from Berlin to Poland to the Gallery of Orchard Zoo in 2012. And actually, it was a very hard summer day. And I was stuck in the traffic jam. It was really melting a lot. But I made it and brought it there and put it in some wire. And some metal below for the sound. And yeah, just let it down and put the light on it. And it was actually the first light installation I did with it. And I had some smaller experience. In between 2016, I showed it in sea-based Berlin and using also the Martelite installations. I think many people know that one. And E-Punk made a nice video with the QR code. You can see it. It's also a super-way sound and everything. Yeah, and here are some impressions of the ice. And I took some very small rope to hang it there. And next time, I showed it in a really big rope. And it was really actually amazing because the ice got smaller and smaller, but it didn't fall off. So this is actually at the beginning of the evening. And this is how it looks like a bit later. And this is the day after, three small. But it takes about 24 to 36 hours until it's melted down. And then I started to measure the ice drops and to get an impression of how actually the dropping and the melting is changing by time. And I used some sensors. But I will explain more about this later. And it is with Raspberry Pi and Arduino made. I said, this was in Berlin before. OK, now this is a small video about the festival in the nation of Kondwana, I want to show. That's it, a little bit slow here. And I know if you can hear it, it was outside on Pratid. And I saw it, and when I make a hole in it and hang it on, it's actually quite stable and robust. And people can touch it. Yeah, if there would be no corona, like you would pass by and look from time to time how much it's melting down. And actually what I thought also for tonight, I just leave it on. And from time to time, you can just pass by, switch in and see how the ice is melting. So which is now also in my background. So another time, I just took it in my backpack and bring it to Saarbrücken, which is close to France. And it started also to melt. People were saying to me, hey, your backpack is leaking. And I said, it's OK. And so here you see also that I made some experiments and like taking the impulse of the water drops and like taking, saving the data, how many water drops in five seconds. It are falling over time. Yeah, and there are some other installations. People are hanging around. And since like two years, I have studied collaboration with Gallery GH36 in Berlin. And yeah, and by this, I'm more and more makes the experiments with measuring. So you see the sensors. It's actually a piezo sensor. It's quite a simple, small thing. Physically, I can even show it to you. It's a big one. I don't know if you see it. And it's just a piece of metal. And when an impulse goes on it, it makes some a bit of, takes it. The voltage will change a bit. And just you can use it to trigger anything. Trigger sound or make anything out of it. And I'm playing around with it or even count it. So I started with counting. Now I start to trigger ultrasound. And yeah, this is basically the setup. And I made some. Here you see it also. And yeah, so I take this impulse, put it on Arduino and with the Raspberry below, and which is like taking the impulses. And then I have some data visualization by time, like you see here. So this is the water drops in five seconds and counting how much they were differently. I mean, there's a lot of also the measurement itself. It's not that easy because of the material and where you put it and everything. It's actually quite interesting to get a bit deeper about the question, what the value are actually measuring and what you're measuring for. And what does it actually say? It's also not the discussion. And I have a lot of people who are also accompanying me from time to time. So thank you for all. And there are many people helping me setting it up and programming ideas and everything. And I had also the shot before the first lockdown. For example, I met the pilot in the Kunst-Edition at Punk Gallery in Berlin. And we were discussing about the possibilities of the data, which is locked. And also with women in the academy, I started to analyze it. But with the lockdown, it stopped. I mean, as we want to continue it, and I think it's a bit more easier when the lockdown is gone. But to come back to the first point about the global loss of eyes, like this eyes, you see my background, tomorrow it will be gone. It's just a small piece. And this is actually more like a symbol for what's happening in the global warming. And here you have actually a map which shows a bit more realistic how big the continent of Antarktis actually is, as I told you before, it's as big as South America, a vanishing continent. But it's not only like the pole, which is vanishing. It's also all kind of high mountains, like the Andes, and also in Alaska, and also Himalaya, northern Norway, wherever you find glaciers, they just lose mass in a huge amount. So if you look, since 1961, all the ice which was lost in the whole world was, you can read it on the left down, it was 9,625 gigatons. But does it mean this is a completely crazy number? If you look at this, it is. OK, let's start. So this is 9,000, thousands, millions. And I have to take care for the correct English. Then you have billions. And at the end, you end in trillions. That's a number with 12 zeros. I don't know how we count stars or something, but this is not about stars or anything. It's about the water amount. We are now losing in ice at the moment. And my daughter, who is engaged in Fridays for Future, told me that it's not only the children who should do something about it, that actually we are all called to action to do something and to support the actions the youth is doing at the moment. So OK, that's the final word I want to say to you. And yeah, if you're interested to get in contact, to be involved in any way, and to play around with the data with sound and anything, just get in contact. I'm linked in. And you find also my Twitter handle. I will post some photographs tonight. And you can see how it is the ice loose mass. And then we will also stay in this stream here. And you can switch it in. And if you want to see some of the programming, you can look up GitHub at my account and for the Twilight framework. Yeah, thank you very much. And yeah, open for question. Thank you very much, Peggy, for this interesting talk. I'm looking down to the pad for some questions. And there was just one guy already complaining about the drops in the background. Because the people didn't realize that it's the real insulation. Yeah. And so I have some questions if nobody knows the time for you people out there to ask some questions. But in between, I will ask some, I think, back. So you talked about the sensor you use. And as I understood, it's something like a trigger. Yeah, it can trigger stuff. Have you also thought about using other sensors, too, to compare sensors together, like, for example, temperature? Yes, also. I mean, I was thinking about freezing in some temperature locker and compare how much the influence is. Because actually, it is the inner temperature of the eyes, the outer temperature of the eyes, and the amount of eyes which has the impact on the melting. It's actually, I mean, it's like it's also on the Arctic, for example, because you have like the streaming of the water, like this is for the inner temperature, which is pushing the melting and also the outer of the area, the temperature of the air, but not only. OK. And what kind of data do you get from this trigger? How can you, is this the data of the speed of melting? Or how would you specify this? That's the interpretation. It's like, first, it's about measuring. So it's actually counting the drop in a certain time frame. Every five seconds, how many drops are falling. And then the interpretation is another, what do you do with it? You know, what does it actually mean when you say, I know, for example, when I hang it, when I hang the eyes and it's really cold in the beginning, nothing melts. After a while, it started slowly to melt. And then it starts more and more. And in the moment, the whole eyes has a certain temperature. It's melting much more, much more also. Like now, for example. And then there was this question about MIDI. You said you will also provide MIDI data out of this. Can you tell me a little bit about this? Yeah, basically, as this piezo sensor we're using, it's actually like a contact microphone. And we started to take this and to trigger, how you say, to transfer it, to change it into MIDI data, which is a protocol for communication between musical instruments. Also, like how music instruments can put you sound and also trigger sound. And so it's possible to trigger any kind of sound or whatever who understands this sort of, let's say, control language. This is a lot of, yeah. It's actually standard, especially for music interface. And at the moment, when I actually planning to do it online, we didn't make it. I don't know, because if you tonight, I can figure something out and tomorrow morning we run. But at the moment, we can choose this change within Raspberry and choose it locally for MIDI triggering of sound. Oh, yeah. So the sound we hear in the background now, is it just a simple sound, the water dropping on metal? Or is it the sound through the sensor? This is just like just on the metal right now. OK. So I think and also the idea of the question by this person in the chat was that the question was, is this available somewhere, the MIDI files? If you manage to provide the MIDI files, is this available? Can people do something with it? And not at the moment. That's what we actually are planning for tonight. But I'm sorry. So if anybody feels like tinkering together with me and working a bit out, I invite to get in contact with me and make it possible. Because it's just a simple technical question. At the moment, not yet. I'm sorry for that. So if somebody wants to help or if somebody's interested to talk a little bit more about this, I would suggest to contact you over Twitter or what else you have here. Twitter is perhaps the best thing here in this chaos. Yes. And thank you very much, Peggy, for this nice talk. And now we'll see your installation till tomorrow morning at 10 or? Yes, just let it go. And yeah, you can just switch in and take a look. And yeah. Yeah. But you know. Have a nice and calm meditation night with drops, with ice drops. So thank you very much. I will say goodbye now and leave you alone with your installation. Thank you. Thank you very much. And very much for inviting me and giving the chance to show us installation. Thanks for having me. Well, it was nice to having you. Bye. Bye.