We have a massive and ambitious installation called Weather Projection opening in Sydney this coming Tuesday; the premier of NSW is visiting on Monday to open the show. They expect 300,000 visitors.
Our project is all about bringing the light of elsewhere to the darkness of Sydney's night. We've created a platform of participation and we'd love to have a particular type of input from you, or from others that you might know : we'd love you to send us your sun.
The project transmits footage of the sun rising across the world at the moment it sets in Sydney. It shows the city what the world looks like as it wakes up, shimmering into wakefulness. A large cluster of projections cast light captured by people across the Americas - the landmass where the sun hits between 1800 and 2400 Sydney time. So we need this light, and hope that you can help us find it.
We 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. We can send a detailed specification if you're interested to get involved and join the community of solar chronographers.
If you can't send us anything, perhaps you know others that can. Or perhaps your friends know people who'd be interested. This project can only succeed by distribution, travel and networking - by you sending this mail around the world. So please send this call for participation onto anyone you think might be interested - particularly those with a passion for photography, weather & sunshine.
The attached pdf gives an overview of the project, as does the website www.weatherprojection.co.uk.
We have set up a simple Flickr photostream as well other playlists/groups with the other main forums Facebook, Youtube and Vimeo.
There is :
a facebook group called ‘weather projection’ at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=88687060881&ref=mf
a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=88687060881&ref=mf#/pages/Weather-Projection-synchronous-social-sunlight/87853516746
a Flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/1116334@N21/pool/
Our YouTube playlist is set up to help showcase the work:http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=atmosstudio&view=playlists
ditto our Vimeo group : http://www.vimeo.com/user418245/groups
You can navigate the amazing site in 3d by clicking on the KMZ file at http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=a7aec860ffcb940772c207b6e779691a
or simply find it at http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=115127825645673587495.0004634789cc1b884d2aa&ll=-33.854558,151.204855&spn=0.014862,0.034075&z=16
We hope you're well - and that you can help us compensate for London's disastrous lack of sunshine by helping pour sunshine into Sydney's night sky.
Time is short; the world turns less than 7 times before we open. Please get in touch; please send us your sun!
All the best,
Alex Haw
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Weather Projection explores our relationship to artificial light, the weather as media, and the relationship between nature and humanity. It offers the experience of perpetually renewed sunlight. It enables visitors, as the sun sets locally over Sydney harbour, to watch it immediately rise again in real-time from remote viewpoints around the world.
The pavilion’s dome becomes a celestial projection screen kept constantly lit by sunshine beaming in from all the occupied places where it is just beginning to rise. 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.
The footage is delivered by a network of solar observers - collaborative chronographers transmitting their local atmosphere. Each person distributed across the globe makes a vital contribution to this fluctuating tapestry of sunlight; Sydney’s dying light is relit by distributed collaboration. Our core deference to meteorological or astronomical instruments momentarily cedes to the power of people, and to the importance of the observer.
EVENT INFO
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.
www.smartlightsydney.com
http://vividsydney.com/
http://tinyurl.com/ow7xsl
http://vimeo.com/4725226
www.weatherprojection.co.uk
www.atmosstudio.com
LOCATION
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.
Sydney Observatory is located on Watson Road, Observatory Hill, The Rocks
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=a7aec860ffcb940772c207b6e779691a
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=115127825645673587495.0004634789cc1b884d2aa&ll=-33.854558,151.204855&spn=0.014862,0.034075&z=16
SETUP
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.
COLLABORATION : SYNCHRONOUS SOCIAL SUNLIGHT
This installation is only made possible by the contribution of others - illuminated by sunlight, powered by people. It offers a local platform that collectivises individual experiences - a spatial forum, both analogue (in Sydney) and digital (online) from which to show and share sunshine.
This world is your world. Please send us your sun.
For further details on how to get involved and show your work, please contact Alex Haw :
atmos.studio AT gmail.com, +44 (0)7815 040 619 or Friedrich Vitzthum, (ditto) +44 (0)7984 820 788.
www.weatherprojection.co.uk
