For several years I've worked on a series of projects which takes weather as a proxy for place. My own memories of geography are closely associated with climate. These correlations may not be accurate, but they are strong and emerge as terse, often romantic, mental snapshots of a locale and a moment, or as a highly statistical representation of weather-in-a-place over time. To my mind all are landscapes.
Probability Chart, 2007
A perhaps clearer version of the above. All the data has been condensed into 52 weekly wedges, each wedge colored according to the probability of rain that week (from 0% to 90% in 10% increments) based on 16 years of weather data. As above, the radius of each segment is proportional to average high and low temps.
Weather Sculpture Movie, 2004
A CAD animation of a proposed sculpture based on the drawings above.
Quicktime movie (1.2MB, 29 seconds)
Laytonville Weather, 2002
A first attempt at a probability chart for northern Mendocino County. It takes 10 years of data on temperature and lays it out in a circle of months. Each square is the sky conditions for that year, month and day, with day one being on the outside and working to the center for the whole month. The color concentrations suggest the likelihood of conditions around that time. The radius of each segment is proportional to average high and low temps.
Weather Sculpture, 2005
I began the actual sculpture in 2005, starting with a full-scale wood and foam mold over which we built a fiberglass shell. Alas, fumes from the process sickened several members of my NY coop so work was terminated before the piece was completed.
Mold above, fiberglass shell below.
Cylinders, NY and CA, 2004
Traveling, both physically and emotionally, from NY to N. Calif, I became curious about why the climate was so much more comfortable out west. I designed cylinders whose walls represent the turn of the seasons and whose top edge varied in height with temperature. Wall thickness varies with rainfall. New York's rain falls all year round; California's concentrates in seasons, which is clear in the pieces.
These were cast in resin while I was still in NY. To date I haven't gotten around to finishing them as the process is extraordinarily tedious.
Tokyo Weather, 2004
Similar to the pieces above, Tokyo weather reflects conditions over an average year. How, exactly, I'm not sure as the exact dimensions of this proposal have been lost
I've recently been experimenting with time lapse video of climatic events. Here are a few.
Clouds(1), 2007
850KB
32 seconds
Clouds(2), 2007
700KB
32 seconds
Clouds(3)moon, 2007
1.1MB
42 seconds
Storm(1), 2007
1.1MB
1'14"