Solar Halo: an A/V Work for 16 atmospheric weather stations and live performer

‘Solar Halo’ is a new work for live internet data in performance that explores the real time dynamics of weather systems. Using custom developed software, the project draws upon live data from 16 atmospheric weather stations – eight across the Australian Alpine Country and eight across New York City. Live weather data then drive an audio-visual system with which the performer interacts.

With the arrival of the internet and public data streams, new opportunities have arisen to explore the ways in which real-time (or live) data may be deployed in an artwork, but in this case the context is a live performance event. This recent technical development has opened the possibility of art works being responsive to live internet data, thus extending the notion of context responsive art into the datasphere so that artworks may become ‘internet enabled’.

Climate is inextricably linked to notions of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which humans have impacted global ecosystems. Given the struggle to make science heard within public discourse around climate change, there is a need to connect people to climate challenges. The creative deployment of data provides an opportunity to communicate the challenges that fragile climate systems face as a result of human activity.

On a creative level, the project is inspired by philosopher Timothy Morton’s notion of the ‘hyperobject’ – entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. Climate change and the internet can be seen as clear examples, vast in scale and forever present in the background.

“Hyperobjects are here, right here in my social and experiential space. Like faces pressed against a window, they leer at me menacingly: their very nearness is what menaces (Timothy Morton, 2013)”

The project brings these two hyperobjects together to help us approach the otherwise incomprehensible.