2006 Gwangju Biennale, Korea - 2
As promised in a previous post, a picture of the installation in Korea. Chris Welsby, the artist is seen in front of the display panel. The panel (see pic beneath) correlates the data being received from the four centres with the image of the tree displayed on the three screens (only two visible in this shot).
Interaction with the Natural World (by Chris Welsby)
“Only one channel will be projected at any given moment in time. If there is a wind shift to the left, footage shot from the left viewpoint will play on the left screen. If there is a wind shift to the right, the right viewpoint footage will play on the right screen and if the wind direction is constant and steady the centre viewpoint will play on the centre screen. In this way the wind will precipitate a visual dance about the central axis of the tree, mapping a three dimensional representation of space and time onto the three projection screens.
In addition, the wind speed will cause the footage to speed up and slow down so that clouds, light and the movement of people will be seen in gusts, and if the wind stops blowing, the footage will hover back and forth over three or four frames; relatively still, but ready to move in either direction.”
“As well as being fed into the video switcher, the signal from the wind sensors will be hooked up to a console with a graphic display representing the wind speed and direction at the various plus the source locations. The consol will be prominently exhibited in the gallery as part of the installation. In this way the viewer may choose to move beyond the expressive nature of the image and sound; and in so doing discover a second level of meaning imbedded within the system as a whole.”
Technical Overview (by Chris Welsby working with Mark Brady) – original description: for six read four weatherstations.
“There will be three main components of the installation itself. Six weather stations, one situated in Korea, and the rest situated on different continents around the globe. The data from all of these stations will be used to drive the three channel image display sound mix and weather console. The weather stations will provide input to the display components, and will be interfaced to the display system via a Serial Connection and Serial-USB converter. The software component will search for the highest wind speed amongst all of the six weather stations. Having selected a station an open source software sub-component will be modified to communicate to the weather stations via the internet using serial link to relay the wind speed and direction data to the Max/MSP display components. The netsend/receive open source Max/MSP externals will be used to complete this relay system. The software component will utilize the Jitter/Max/MSP programming environment to display, animate and cut between the tree footage in response to the weather data, and it will automatically detect significant changes in the wind direction and respond by cutting to the appropriate viewpoint selected from the digitized film footage. ”