[artinfo] The Whitney Museum's Artport

[Andrea Polli]

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM'S ARTPORT PRESENTS THE SOUND OF METEOROLOGICAL DATA
MAY 2004

Contact Andrea Polli 212.772.5589  apolli at hunter.cuny.edu


The Whitney Museum of American Art's Artport
  http://www.whitney.org/artport

PRESENTS:

Atmospherics/Weather Works, a system  for the translation of complex
weather and climate data to sound.  Artport presents a gate page to an
interactive work designed and created by Andrea Polli that allows viewers
to select and listen to the sound of data created by  a detailed model of
Hurricane Bob August 18, 1991.

Artport is the Whitney Museum's portal to net art and digital arts, and
an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects. The artport's
archive of "gate pages," function as portals to net artists' works. Each
month, an artist is invited to present their work in the form of a gate
page with links to the artist's site and most important projects

"Atmospherics/Weather Works is a classic example of the use of data-sets
to generate / create new media art. Re-creating two historic New York /
Long Island storms, the first in 1979 the second in 1991, from available
data and miniaturizing them in proportion to a gallery space, the
creators are almost certainly aware of the information design work of
Edward R.Tufte. The work aims to create a sound-space allowing users to
"gain a deeper understanding of some of the more unpredictable complex
rhythms and melodies of nature" with none of
the potential risks

On the site, which is primarily documentation of the work, the interface
allows users to listen 'to fourteen individual regions from each of five
elevation levels of the sonification of 1991 Hurricane Bob'. Clocking a
whopping 148.7mb filesize, it is one of the largest filesizes I've seen
in an online flash work and the 'best viewed with a high-bandwidth
connection' is an understatement at best but it is worth the wait if you
do have such a connection." Garrett Lynch netartreview

The Atmospherics/Weather Works sound compositions were created by Andrea
Polli in collaboration with meteorological scientist Dr. Glenn Van Knowe
of MESO  with data programming assistance from MESO scientist Dr Kenneth
Waight  and sound programming assistance from Matthew Ostrowski


-- 
Andrea Polli
Associate Professor
Film and Media
Hunter College
695 Park Ave.
New York, NY 10021
212.772.5589
http://www.andreapolli.com