This assignment, I took a tour at the “Cloud Song” Virtual Gallery that Yesuel curated for us. The pieces in this collection are interactive art pieces that turn weather data into some interaction. I picked this one because I also want to find some inspiration for the ITPower Weather band piece as well.
Personally, I really like the idea of having the natural thing inside the room because it is some kind of relaxing moment that we can connect to mother nature. Also, since I moved to New York, I have to have a long-distance relationship with family and friends. I usually checked the weather forecast in my hometown just to check how it's going there. I think the weather can connect us together because we used to experience it together. Sometimes I imagine it would be great if I can have the weather from my home town in my room here.
My favorite piece in this collection is Tempescope by Ken Kawamoto. This piece is exactly what I imagine. The artist literally moves the outside weather into a cube inside our room. It's really fascinating when I see the real water is dropping when there'll be some sign of rain tomorrow or there is some fog inside the cube when the cloudy sky was predicted. I'm really curious about how they can store the water inside the machine. If I have to develop this further, I really want this device to connect to a weather database around the world and the user can select to see the weather from other countries. Also, this piece somehow reminds me of the Japanese rain doll which is the good weather charm in Japanese culture. It might be an interesting idea to combine these two things together.
Another piece that really inspired me is the Airylight by Annelie Berner. This piece visualizes air pollution into a light installation. I'm really into this piece because, since 2018, Thailand was facing a severe air pollution. I used to work with Green peace to organize the exhibition to communicate the impact of this problem. In this piece, the artist used the air quality data from the web database as an input to control the light in a wonderful way. If I have to recreate this piece, I really want to add a sense of emergency to the piece, for example, the color of the light when it was unhealthy or add some smoke into a room. Because this is a serious problem that has severe effects on our health. I really want to persuade people to concern about it.
This collection makes me think about one art piece that I saw on the internet a long time ago. It's called "The Cloud Piano" by David Bowen. This piece turns the pattern of the cloud that passes by into real piano music. David used the camera to take the video of the sky and divided it into 88 little files that were assigned to one key of the piano. If the video file has more white than blue then press the piano key. The mechanism that he used to press the key is simply the servo motors. For me, this piece makes the sky tangible and I really like to hear the sky sing a song :)
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