The weather project

Summary:

The “weather project” is -originally- an installation artwork by Olafur Eliasson (Figure 1) exhibited at Tate, London, in 2003. In Eliasson’s installation, objects representing the sun, and lights representing the light of the sky are exposed at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Gallery. The observer is dazzled with an atmospheric experience indoors. An outdoor experience replaces the limits of the walls and the ceiling of the gallery.

In our project, we propose to create a live animated film material that uses a similar logic, specifically recreating the outdoor conditions within an animated artificial reality of a weather-sensitive animation. Immersive technologies and experimental practices can be applied to create environments within art installation concepts and explore live animation capabilities.

Figure 1 Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003, Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminum, and scaffolding, 26.7 m x 22.3 m x 155.4 m Installation in Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London Photo: Studio Olafur EliassonCourtesy the artist: neugerriem schneider, Berlin: and Tanya Bonakdar, New York

Implementation:

As mentioned above, the animated film material will be weather-sensitive, meaning that it will be transforming following the actual real-time weather conditions (wind, temperature, rain, humidity, barometric pressure).

To implement this project, we need to acquire and extract weather data from a weather station installed nearby. The data extraction must be processed through a programming language (namely Python) and interact with a 3D animated setting that will be projected.

What we expect to find:

The implementation of this project will experiment with the concept of creating artificial realities with references to real-time, actual data. Actual weather data will be “translated” into artificial animated narratives and meanings, anchored to “real” data. As with the previously mentioned projects, this idea has technical and philosophical parameters and implications that we could extract and expand.  

Published by

labforanimationresearch

Lab for Animation Research (LAR) operates as a research centre for studying the art of animation. Specifically, LAR operates as a lab within the Department of Fine Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology and aims at studying the artistic possibilities of animation. LAR uses a wide range of digital and “traditional” technologies and artistic practices as methods to experiment, study and develop innovative expressive methods for creating animation artworks.

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