visit siteThe Canary Project began in 2006. After consulting with climate-change researchers and journalists, photographer and multimedia artist Susanna Sayler selected 16 landscapes around the world. She began photographing them. Her mission is to show that global warming is already affecting every place on earth in a variety of ways. By spring, 2007, she had compiled persuasive visual evidence of climate change and its potential for devastation. The title of their project refers to a mining practice. Miners once used canaries to warn of deadly methane levels underground. If the canary they carried with them into the mine died, the miners knew they had to get out of the shaft. Sayler and Morris consider the landscapes they’re photographing to be “warnings of more severe changes to come.” In her photo: "Drought and Fires: Umatilla National Forest, Washington State, 2006", depicts that year's exceptionally destructive fire season, described by the director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Climate Research Division as "another part of a chain of reactions to climate warming."
"The Great Barrier Reef, Belize 2006" documents coral reefs that are part of a UNESCO World Heritage site are dying due to rising ocean temperatures and other environmental stresses.
In her photo: "The Disappearing City," a town's water tower is buried in debris of Hurricane Katrina.
In "Solutions: Windmills in Palm Springs, California," windmills produce enough clean energy to power 25,000 homes.
Their website is a growing exhibition with multiple resources for concerned and networked audiences. And they bring their work to schools.
Sayler and Morris don’t take canaries to the shifting, maybe even shrinking, limits of life on planet Earth. They take emerging media practices and technologies. Their project uses media as feelers—remote sensors of natural and human forces that have played out to extreme limits. They extend our senses of sight to places we could otherwise never see--or "feel"--with our own eyes. In this project, media become early warning devices—signals of urgent and pressing change that requires individual and social response: What is this place? What happened here? Who has been here? What might I do here?
The Canary Project asks us to think and feel change through media.
The Canary Project, for example, understands that what is important is not (only) the "data/information" in the photograph of the melting glacier, but also the sensory experience of the photograph’s design elements and the dynamic of its global circulation, exchange, remixing, recontextualizing, remediation across media platforms. From the start, that is what a photograph in this project is "about."
Understanding this involves Sayler, as a media designer, directly in CHANGE. Understanding this invites her to imagine not simply "designing media content or messages” but to imagine creatively mating and mutually contaminating her work of media design with cultural taste, historical event, social dynamics, technological innovation, economic exchange, emergent networks, and border-blurring bio and political forces.