Lines Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Jan 1 2017

Location: 

Scotland

Located off the west coast of Scotland are the Outer Hebrides, an island chain where Finnish artists Pekka Niittyvirta and Timo Aho decided to install their piece, Lines. The installation is composed of lines of light wrapped around buildings or hovering on a grass field. At high tide, the lights turn on, illuminating the serene landscape, and marking the height of future sea-level rise on the low-lying archipelago.
The simple yet striking installation reminds viewers of the catastrophic impact of rising sea levels, an issue particularly relevant to the Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, where the installation is situated. Due to predicted storm surge sea levels, the centre can no longer develop on its existing site.

"After looking at the theme from various angles, we concluded we’d make an artwork discussing this very relevant issue in seaside communities around the world. Highlighting the future predictions of sea-level rise with LED visually resonates with contemporary consumer society, and at an individual level.

We were hoping to pinpoint an important issue by the means of art: Art carries the potential to convey complex ideas, concepts and scientific data in a powerful way that other mediums, like texts or graphs may fall short of."

External sources: 

http://niittyvirta.com/lines-57-59-n-7-16w/
https://vimeo.com/268787584
Posted by abbytrott on Apr 30 2021

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.
OtherHelps bring about change in a way not accounted for in the options above. Please describe how it does this in the text box below.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
Create awareness about the rising sea levels that feels very personal to the viewer

Notes

I think it is a very effective way of showing viewers and people how the rising sea level does affect them and their life. Seeing a line where your city or community will be under water at some point is a very simple and impressionable act of art. I think as their work spreads to different cities etc it will get more of a buzz, and start more conversations. But I do not know what kinda of actions this has resulted in or how it would activate the viewer to take action.