Exhibition – atmos: weather as media

Sonic Antarctica (event documentation), by Andrea Polli

atmos: weather as media is an exhibition of air, sun, clouds and storms. In Ancient Greece the word atmos meant ‘breath’ or ‘vapour’: it applied equally to both the human and the planetary realms.

Today, atmos sometimes refers to the vaporous mist dissolving the visible background of a scene in cinema special effects, or to the background ambient noise that fills out a dialogue track in sound engineering. But periodically the atmosphere moves to the foreground – in the form of cataclysmic storms or droughts. And, within the persistent hum of atmos, we are now also hearing the increasingly clear message of a shifting climate.

The exhibitionpresents a selection of international and New Zealand artists who incorporate aspects of the weather directly into their practices, drawing attention to the agency of unpredictable natural phenomena. These are artists working at the borders of science, technology and ecology: some use weather in their art-making process, some simulate atmospheres, while others approach weather allegorically. At a time of ecological stress, their mediations in weather become ciphers for dialogue, critique and transformation.

As they map out connections between art, weather, science and temporality, these artists provoke us to ask questions such as: How does weather mark time? How does the atmosphere get condensed or expanded in digital space? If the Impressionists sought to ‘fix’ the fleeting effects of weather visually through painting, in the post-war period artists sought instead to yield to the contingent, ‘live’, real-time immediacy of everyday phenomena. The 1960s and 1970s were a time when ‘liveness’ had multiple modes in art outside the institution, and the artists in atmos share an interest in the aleatory weather event with several important artists of this period. There is, for example, a live, experiential quality to coexisting with the wind and weather when viewing kinetic sculpture such as Len Lye’s Wind Wands (1960). Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1971-77) is activated by the arrival of a storm. Hans Haacke referred to his freezing ice and condensing vapour works in the 1960s as ‘real–time systems’ and Yoko Ono uses real-time video of the mutable sky in Sky TV (1966) – the latter anticipating the live-streaming digital data used by artists Corby and Baily. These artists embrace the dissipation and excess of environmental matter, but also the periods of stillness or waiting time that necessarily occur within a dynamic system.

While artists were gathering up the weather in the 1960s, the science of stable matter was giving way to the flux of quantum science. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s numerical experiments revealed that small disparities in the initial conditions of his weather simulations led to major differences in outcomes. The problem of predicting the weather system mathematically had far-reaching implications for the development of a new science, later called ‘chaos’ science. Twenty-first century developments in computing allow for ever more complex simulations of the biosphere. Several artworks in atmos trace a picture of the world as a complex interplay between informational and material patterns; an interplay which emerges from a space between science and art. In this space, where weather becomes art media, the exploration of productive disorder as norm rather than aberration offers us alternative ways of relating to contemporary reality. It allows permanence in art objects to be exchanged for fluid dynamics, and stability in institutional and cultural politics to be exchanged for perpetual transformation.

The weather creates its own dynamic pictures, sounds and sensations, which we react to consciously or unconsciously all the time. Weather enfolds the environment that we inhabit, inviting response: the tactile sense is activated by a light breeze; subtle shifts in temperature are registered by the skin; the sound of thunder or rain soothes or threatens; weather produces the scent of a new season in the air and vision registers the colours generated by the sun’s light. When artists use weather as media in their artwork they connect to a long history of human engagement with the weather as a beautiful, frustrating, sometimes frightening spectacle. The vapour produced by the respiration of the planet forms clouds, storms and also creative approaches. By using weather as media for art production the artists in atmos suggest that the contingent nature of atmospheric conditions enables new sensory possibilities. Their many weathers may signal disorder – but it is a liberating and productive disorder.

Janine Randerson, Curator

atmos: weather as media – October 18 – November 15, 2008

MIC Toi Rerehiko – Media and Interdisciplinary Arts Centre, Auckland New Zealand

Ground Truth on YouTube – part 1

Ground Truth on YouTube – part 2

The 12-minute short documentary ‘Ground Truth’

Ground Truth follows weather and climate observation at the South Pole, McMurdo Station and field sites in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica and asks why people go to remote, uncomfortable and often hazardous locations, doing what is known as ‘ground truthing.’

Directed by Andrea Polli

Videography and sound by Andrea Polli and Tia Kramer

Post-production by Andrea Polli, Brandon Lied, Greg O’Brien, Linda Post and Leslie Lavelanet

Transcripts and graphics by Klew Williams and Andrea Polli

Starring:Hassan Basagic and Dr. Andrew Fountain, The Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research Group and Portland State University, Dr. John Cassano, The University of Colorado, Boulder, Victoria Sankovic, Katie Koster, Jeff DeRosa, Jonathan Tham, Shelley Knuth

With the voices of: Dr. Andreas Fischlin, Dr. Wolfgang Rack, Dr. Adam Lewis and Dr. Peter Doran

and sonifications of data by Andrea Polli using data from the LTER, the Antarctic AWS Project, The University of Wisconsin Madison and ice movement data by Dr. Slawek Tulaczyk and Jake Walter of the University of California Santa Cruz

Supported by The National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, The University of Colorado, Boulder Center for Humanities and the Arts, Department of Art and Art History, ATLAS Institute and Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, and the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation

Excerpt from Ground Truth with the voice of Dr. Andreas Fischlin of ETH Zurich.