http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk
“As soon as the sun disappears, we think that the day is over,” Haw said. “But the day is just starting in other places in the world. It’s continuously rising as we get further into twilight.”
Atmos have been selected as one of the international artists for Smart Light Sydney, opening 26th may; 300,000 visitors are expected. http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk.
* ALSO Alex is calling for participation with footage of the sun rising across the world at the moment it sets in Sydney.
They would love you to contribute a sequence of time-lapse photography showing the transition of daylight over the early hours of sunrise. We’re looking for beautiful examples of sequential interval photography - large numbers of well-composed still frames adequate to assemble into movies. They can send a detailed specification if you’re interested to get involved and join the community of solar chronographers.
http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=88687060881&ref=mf
The installation is one of the major international projects for Smart Light Sydney. Smart Light Sydney is a celebration of innovation through light art, music and ideas events, happening across Sydney 26 May – 14 June. Smart Light Sydney is part of Vivid Sydney - the biggest international music and light festival in the Southern Hemisphere.
The project had a generous preview as the main representative of the festival in a large spread on page 3 of the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the major national newspapers. The initial media launch was extensively covered in the media. New Tang Dynasty TV broadcast their coverage to the entire world via 4 satellites, as well as to Sydney through free to air channel 31(TVS). The organisers anticipate 300,000 visitors – not counting any online presence.
The installation occupies the bandstand pavilion (100 years old this year) high up on Sydney’s Observatory Hill, adjacent to the Sydney Observatory. It has great views of the magnificent harbour and the Sydney Opera House below, of the stream of adjacent traffic flowing North over the Harbour Bridge - and of the sun, rising continually in the East, but originating, as image, in the West.
The project echoes the central historical role in both astronomy and meteorology once played by the adjacent observatory. It was made world-famous in the 1880s for its astronomical photographs, involved Sydney in one of the greatest international astronomy projects ever undertaken. It is now a working museum where evening visitors can observe the stars and planets through a modern 40 cm Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a historic 29cm refractor telescope built in 1874, the oldest telescope in Australia in regular use.
4 linked wide-angle projectors cast an ever-shifting series of melodious time-lapse movies showing the precise atmospheric phenomenon of the sun’s majestic rise, varying with every location and day. The central computer draws down distributed feeds from an ftp server and continuously fetches live satellite imagery. The individual instances of time-lapse photography are supplemented by high-res live cloud data of the Western Hemisphere drawn down at quarterly intervals from NASA satellites – a cloudy blanket momentarily interrupting and obscuring the sunlight. Real-time graphics offer an overlaid 5-handed polar clock displaying 6,12 and 24 hr hands sweeping across the entire image, fading momentarily into view as each new location is scanned and activated.
Each new solar projection is triggered at precisely the moment that the sun is rising – changing each day - in the location of its source footage. A timeline, generated each day anew from fluctuating solar data, intersperses time-lapse footage with satellite imagery, explanatory animations with chronological updates. A webcam sends it all back out to the world from which it came.
As Smart Light Sydney begins, the sun first hits landmass in remote north-eastern Canada and the eastern shores of Brazil, slowly sweeping across the Americas until its sole terrestrial glint is seen at the western tips of Alaska and a few sparse Pacific islands. This sparsity is infilled by a review of the evening – a final rapid uber-time-lapse playing back the whole evening’s activity, crescendoing at midnight.
The Sydney Morning Herald previewed the project on p.3, 6.5.09 as “Eternal sunshine of an artist’s creative mind”: http://www.smh.com.au/national/eternal-sunshine-of-an-artists-creative-mind-20090506-aveb.html
alex will be giving one of the keynote speeches:
http://vividsydney.com/smart-light-symposia/
http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk
http://vimeo.com/4725226
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bShTRErjRw&fmt=18
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