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Toxic art | John Sabraw | TEDxWarwick
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we're in
trouble global
warming species
Extinction water scarcity the list goes
on and on we know the list what can we
do about it
uh I'm an artist and so I decided to
start working on these crises by
developing a sustainable Art Studio
practice because an artist studio
practice is actually like a small
manufacturing Enterprise we purchase raw
and component materials in the case of a
painter these might be paints brushes
and canvases and from these we actually
develop an item that will be for
distribution or sale say like a painting
you know there's a lot of different ways
is that you can actually create a
sustainable art practice you can
conserve water you can Source your
electricity from Green energy and you
can also purchase um carbon offset
credits to offset the greenhouse gases
that are produced from your practice so
an offset a carbon offset is essentially
a reduction in emissions over here that
offsets the emissions of carbon over
here creating a balance and therefore a
carbon neutral situation
so I actually worked with carbonfund.org
and we created a rubric that would make
it very simple for artists to click a
button and carbon offset their art
practice to make it
neutral so okay so uh one of the other
things I did uh which is maybe not as
serious but certainly a lot of fun for
me is um I actually offset the Mona Lisa
um so a lot of art historians who asked
me not to use their names uh because
they didn't want their reputations
ruined by this highly speculative
Endeavor but um we got a lot of
information about how Leonardo worked
while he was making the Mona Lisa we
made an estimation of how much
greenhouse gas he produced and then we
purchased um carbon offset credits and
so I sent a letter to the lou actually
congratulating them on the carbon
neutral status of their Mona Lisa
and you I did didn't hear back just
saying um
so I've always been an environmentalist
but this push towards sustainability
itself really came about because of a
large art installation project that I
was working on titled
scale um and in scale I worked with an
incredible array of people in a large
collaborative team there were dozens of
artists students and uh community
members that were helping us this is one
of the pieces from that this is actually
a drawing that's 26 MERS by 3 meters
high it was handmade out of charcoal of
the Milky Way
galaxy so the purpose of scale was to
actually demonstr demate how infantes
small humankind is versus the expanse of
the universe uh the goal there was to
actually reveal the Ridiculousness of
our petty differences and I may have
been like slightly over ambitious but
you know I really wanted to go after it
but in order to be accurate about the
scale of humans and the Scale of the
Universe I needed the help of some
astrophysicists now I had just recently
moved to Athens Ohio where I accepted a
position as a professor of art at Ohio
University University and I didn't know
anybody but I found two scientists who
were willing to meet me and just before
I go to the meeting my wife said don't scare
scare
them and it's totally it's totally valid
warning because artists you know we oh
you know we've got a reputation um and
it's it's totally like warranted so I go
to the meeting very calmly not to scare
the scientists you know and uh it was
amazing because artists who think
they're passionate need to start hanging
out with some scientists because you're
going to have to up your
game I found really Kindred Spirits in
the form of Dr mongala Sharma who's
there in the teal dress on the left and
Dr Tom Statler who's in the cool leather
jacket um they're talking by the way to
Dr Seth shostak who's the senior
astronomer at the SEI Institute which is
the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence and that's a fun guy to
talk to so what happened is that these
scientists who help me so much with that
introduced me to a group of
environmental scientists and these
environmental scientists began to show
me the fascinating history of natural
resource extraction in Southeast Ohio so
on one of the field trips we went to
some streams and in these streams there
was a strange orange sludge that went
through the streams and I learned from
them that this is caused by acid mine
drainage and that it kills the Aquatic
Life in over
1,300 streamed miles in Ohio alone
and so what happened is that in
Southeastern Ohio throughout the first
half of the 20th
century strip mining and coal mining
with room and pillar methods were very
commonplace and what they did is the
companies came in and they clear-cut the
forests and they extracted all the soil
out and then they dug tunnels to get the
coal now um there aren't that many mines
left in the area just a few and by the
1970s most of the mining companies had
moved on but what they left
behind was disturbed land abandoned
mines and basically inadequate
restoration so at this point much of the
forest has regrown but it's very young
but the underground mines continue to
leech toxic acid mine drainage into
Life and essentially I was looking at
these streams and some of them are
really incredible this is actually um at
TR toown Ohio and this one seep alone
pumps over a million gallons every
single day of toxic acid mine drainage
into Sunday Creek and this water has a
final P pH rather below two and it
carries over 2,000 pounds of iron every
single day it's like throwing a car in a
stream every single day so I'm out there
with these environmental scientists and
I see this you know iron orange sludge
and I was thinking like
well some of my paints are made from Iron
Iron
sludge you know I wonder if I could
paint with this stuff and as so often
happens basically I get a call from
somebody who said would you meet with an
engineering Professor they need an
artist's help and I said yeah sure you
know so I go to meet this guy for coffee
and it turns out that his name is Guy
this is Professor guy reefer who's an
engineering professor of Ohio University
um and he told me all about the fact
that these abandoned mines they fill
with water and when they fill with water
the water and the oxygen react with
minerals that have been buried for 300
million years and when sulfides are
present and these are common in
Appalachian coal deposits high
concentrations of sulfuric acid and iron
are produced and that's what causes the
aine drainage but I also wanted to show
you guy in his natural
habitat because as as a team member okay
so basically he's got this like hair
trigger Adventure bug so you can bait
him anytime just if you ever meet him
literally anytime day or night I'll be
there I could just this is me texting by
the way so I could just like text him be
like hey guy just thinking about going
to this haunted cold tunnel I heard a
boom guy's like already out front he's
got extra coffee and a pair of waiters
and he's like get in you know like
thanks Guy cool you know anyway so it
turns out that actually he was having
the exact same thoughts as me at the
same time and that's why he wanted my
help so he was starting to ask the
questions you know could we extract this
iron oxide as a valuable
valuable
resource rather than as a waste disposal
could treating pollution be an
entrepreneurial Endeavor rather than a
societal cost so here's the idea is that
we stop the acid mine drainage before it
gets to the stream we extract the iron oxide
oxide
turns it into pigment and then we take
the cleaned water and we return it to
the stream and um here's how that
works our team travels to some of the
worst acid mine drainage seeps in the
streams deceptively as the acid mine
drainage comes out of the mine it's
clear because the iron is still
dissolved and in a reduced
form we collect this water and take it
back to the lab where we will test the
process to turn this iron into
pigment the collected water goes into
our testing apparatus where we can
control things like temperature and
pH our first step in cleaning the water
is to neutralize the
pH we do this by adding a base which
initially turns the water green because
of a reaction with the reduced iron called
called
hydrolysis next to remove the iron we
bubble air through the solution this
oxidizes the iron turning it into an
orange slimy sludge which is typically
what we find in the polluted streams of Southeast
Ohio now that all of the dissolved iron has
has
precipitated we can then separate it
from the Water by settling by letting
the water sit still the solid particles
settle and you have clean treated water
on the top and concentrated iron
precipitate on the
bottom the clean water can be returned
to the stream where it will no longer
cause harm while the concentrated iron
on the bottom can be collected and
processed into pigment through a series
of dewatering and drying
steps at this point we've taken the
orange pollution from the stream and
converted it into a valuable pigment
pigment
so the basic chemistry itself is not
revolutionary but finding a way to
extract the iron oxide so that is
valuable product is and this is why guy
wanted my help what makes a good
pigment hue light fastness stability
feel and I told him that I can
definitely help them you know achieve
those qualities and I began to help to
do that but I also thought that what we
really needed was a sense of beauty that
we actually needed a visual expression
that would demonstrate the story of the
pigment um its
vitality and so I began to use the
pigment in a mix of other standard
artist colors to make paintings that
talked about the Sublimity of
nature as well as the fragility of our
current relationship with it so let me
explain this is essentially what my mind
looks like at any moment of any
day and these things are floating around
I don't sleep much and they're always
competing with each other for something
and they usually happens like this so
This is actually a picture of the Ring
Nebula it's one light year across which
is about 9 trillion kilometers
apparently and then I'll see this image
which is the grand prismatic spring at
Yellowstone it's about 300 met across
and then I'll see this image which is a
datom two microns across and my mind is like
like
dude what are the grand forces of the
universe trying to tell you man and
then I'll make a painting out of it so
this series of paintings are on aluminum
panels and they're about a meter by a
meter and they use the asmine drainage
pigment along with other water-based
pigments so again like I'm thinking
about maybe open source Mining and
chemical pollution and make a
painting or maybe I read about
constructal law you know and jet engines
and galaxies and things and make another
painting interestingly as the pigment
began to evolve in its qualities the
paintings also changed in their
qualities so initially we were only able
to get this color out of the iron oxide
which is perhaps best described in scatological
scatological
terms sorry about
that but we were able in a few months to
get it actually right off stream this
color far sexier you know and so the
paintings changed to accommodate that
and then in the LA just in the last
couple of months we've been able to get
even more color variety by firing the
pigments at high temperatures for short
periods of time so
this is what the pigment looks like raw
we've extracted it from the toxic acid
mine drainage and we've dried it and
processed it and this is what the raw
pigment looks like and this is what a
painting looks like made with those
pigments but when we fire those same raw
pigments at 500 degrees
C we get this color there brilliant
burgundy and so the paintings reflect
that and we also fired it at a th000
degre C and it turned to this the same
pigment turned to this amazing unnatural
Violet and let me tell you that is fun
to paint
with I sent a sample of this last batch
to um a large Paint Company gambling
artist colors in Portland Oregon and
they've agreed to produce a 500 tube
batch of our pigment as oil paints and
these 500 tubes of oil paint are going
to be distributed to artists around the
world their resulting artworks are going
to be curated in into a touring
exhibition so that we can broaden the
discourse on
sustainability so basically with little
funding and lots of Skeptics we've begun
to refine a process that can
continuously treat acid mine drainage
restore the watersheds for Aquatic
Life collect sustainably sourced iron
oxide pigment that can be
sold to pay for the cost of cleaning up
the streams I
I
know so we're hopeful that maybe in the
next few years we will have started a
whole new industry in Southeastern Ohio
and based on our best estimates we
should be able to create a few jobs and
actually produce a small profit all
Source when I was putting all this
together I was actually thinking and I
realized that that my first art science
relationship actually began a long time
ago uh when I was in trouble I was
barely a teenager and I was given a
choice between juvenile
Corrections or counseling and I chose
counseling not only because I couldn't
punch my way out of a wet paper bag but
it was an unusual kind of counseling
essentially once a week I had to travel
to the local University and I had to
meet with a chemistry professor so that
I could learn the true dangers of my own experiments
experiments [Music]
[Music]
um I
know super proud of that
one but fortunately Dr Carl bicker
actually could tell that I was just
trying to find my place in the world I
was you I was just lost in the bigness
of the universe and trying to figure out
why I mattered so instead you know he
introduced me to black holes and
infinity quantum entanglement and
relativity and it's it's these base
Mysteries of the universe that still
drive my paintings today so it was
actually a scientist that helped me
artist and I can tell you that artists
and scientist share two
things we share curiosity and
failure our curiosity drives us to
pursue the most unlikely of
paths and those Pursuits often fall far
short but in those failures we pick up
one clue that drives us to pick up the chase
chase
again and we do not do this work in
isolation we are incredibly grateful to
the amazing variety of people from all
walks of life who have lent their labor
endeavors if we are going to create a
sustainable future for all
I can tell you from experience that
retreating from those different from us
and building walls are not
options we need everyone
involved we're going to have to cross
disciplines Specialties
communities so have a cup with an artist
with a coal miner with a scientist it
changed my life forever for better it'll
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