Brooke Singer
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Brooke Singer is a New York digital media artist and Assistant Professor of New Media at the State University of New York. She is also co-founder of Preemptive Media, an art, technology and activist group.
According to Singer:
Brooke is interested in emerging technologies not only because they are fun but also because they are contingent and malleable. She has utilized wireless communications (Wi-Fi, mobile phones, RFID) to initiate discussion and positive system failures. Her work seeks to provide public access to important social issues that often are characterized as specialized or "for experts only."
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Projects
AIR: Preemptive Media Project
Brooke Singer's AIR (2006) is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use Preemptive Media's portable air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots.
According to the AIR website
Participants or "carriers" are able to see pollutant levels in their current locations, as well as simultaneously view measurements from the other AIR devices in the network. An on-board GPS unit and digital compass, combined with a database of known pollution sources such as power plants and heavy industries, allow carriers to see their distance from polluters as well. The AIR devices regularly transmit data to a central database allowing for real time data visualization on this website.
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Superfund365
Brooke Singer's Superfund365, A Site-A-Day, is an online data visualization application with an accompanying RSS-feed and email alert system. It provides 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S. (this is roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund's National Priorities List). Superfund is the federal government's program to clean up the nation's uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.
According to Singer:
Each day for a year, starting on September 1, 2007, Superfund365 visited one toxic site in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We began the journey in the New York City area and worked our way across the country, ending the year in Hawaii. Today the archive consists of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund's National Priorities List (NPL).
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