HARVEST is a work of critical engineering and computational climate art. It uses wind-energy to mine cryptocurrency, the earnings of which are used as a source of funding for climate-change research.
Taking the form of a 2m wind turbine with environmental sensors, weatherproof computer and 4G uplink, HARVEST ‘feeds’ from two primary symptoms of our changing climate: wind gusts and storms. It does this by transforming wind energy into the electricity required to meet the demanding task of mining cryptocurrency (here Zcash), a decentralised process where computers are financially rewarded for their work maintaining and verifying a public transaction ledger known as the blockchain. Rather than filling the digital wallet of the artist, all rewards earned by the HARVEST mining machine are paid out as donations to non-profit climate change research organisations such that they can better study this planetary-scale challenge.
Acting as a fully functional prototype beyond a media-art context, it is envisaged hundreds of such HARVEST nodes could be deployed in the windiest parts of the world, together generating large sums of supplementary funding for climate-change NGOs in a time where climate science itself is under siege from the fossil-fuelled interests of goverments and corporations.
700W horizontal axis wind turbine
Speaker tripod
3mm guy ropes, rings and stakes
2x 12V 150Ah batteries connected in series (= 24V output). 43kg each.
weatherproof case for each battery
Battery charge controller (24V 3-phase in, 24V DC out)
400W wide input (6V-24V (28V max)) ATX PSU
6V-24V 3A down converter
Mini-ITX mainboard
Intel i3 CPU (Sockel 1151)
NVIDIA GTX 1080 ti GPU
250Gb SSD
4G USB dongle/’surfstick’
Arduino
4Gb DDR 4 RAM
weather proof case modified with rain and insect-proof air intakes and GPU thermal exhaust
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Shell scripts
EWBF miner, mining on nanopool
HARVEST was commissioned by the Skövde Konstmuseet, an exhibition of which was designed and launched on the 14th of September, 2017, running for two months in the museum.
The exhibition comprises a live feed directly from the miner, conveying data relevant to the mining process. This data was visualised by Christopher Pietsch and can be seen in the two projections in the exhibition. Chris has kindly provided a public version of his work on this project here.
The below photos are by Alexandra Magnusson.
Three non-profit climate change research and/or public awareness organisations will be selected to receive the funding at the close of the exhibition. The results of that outcome will be posted here.
HARVEST was generously funded by the Skövde Konstmuseet
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