Park

Park Installation

Towneley Hall Park Burnley as part of AND festival organised by Folly, April 2010

Looking towards the window in the gallery you can see a digital virtual landscape of the view through the window. The artist has embedded an image of the real world inside the artwork and using a network of multiple wireless sensors in Towneley Park he has recorded light, temperature, noise, humidity using customised environmental technologies.

The painterly squiggles on the image show the data and the sounds you can hear are streams of data which the artist has turned into sound.

Park is part a series of data visualisation artworks, made from multiple real time wireless sensors that gather environmental data. Park explores interpretations of a real time landscape, and online interactive space.

This work included converging raw data streams to facilitate a new connectedness in online networked virtual space. This was achieved by extending the artist's previous research into real-time information and collected data streams to allow further interpretations on the way data is built, used, and designed.

These research aims were facilitated by using the newly developed tools and by using the Stanza's newly created online platforms to experience and represent these spaces online that also provide the context of these art installations. Placing these works in a much broader context, these art projects and related research inquiries set out to exploit the changing dynamics of the real-time environement as a source for creativity whose aim is to create meaningful artistic metaphors utilising new technologies.

A series of digital artworks are made using data collected from the environment. The landscape becomes virtual, dynamic, and encoded. The artwork disloses the underlying data that we see thats is changing all the time in front of us making the invisible visible.

The artworks are a series of data visualisations of landscapes. This selection features locations in the Lake District and Towneley Hall Burnley. They are made using wireless sensor networks to map live data from light, temperature, humidity, noise, and gps using customised made environmental technologies.

The sounds you hear are streams of data acquired and processed in custom made software from thirty motes sensors; this is changed into sounds.The squiggles or painterly stuff on the image is a response to the changing light, temperature, noise, humidity and pollution of the landscape....which is also fixed by its gps position. In summary, by putting new systems in place that can re-employ our perception and thus create a new understanding of how this behaviour unfolds, the media artworks act as a dataveillance.

Technology: These artworks are made because I take my sensors to these locations and scatter them about to survey and monitor the landscape. Over 30 small wireless devices are scattered over the environment, data is either recorded or channeled online in real time. Artworks are made using max msp and custom flash scripts from XML and java. In summary: The technical methods evolved in the course of the work took the form of mobile IoT sensors, which were in turn taken to various locations, and setting up a network each time in situ to monitor the site or landscape.

Keywords: visualisation, sonification, net art, techno sublime, sensors, artwork.

Bookings. The equipment is portable and I can bring it to make a visualisation and sonification of any location on a commission basis.

Installation for longer term use or in interesting settings, and as a one off performance.....ie visualisation and sonification for an audience at a designated location...ie quarry, mine, forest, beach, house, nuclear power plant, church, school etc.

Thanks: To Folly and The Lanternhouse for making it possible for me to be in the lake district and thanks to Tor of Folly, who drove me about the Lakes to do this and helped set up sensors at various locations.

Selected data examples.

From 15 motes mts 310 around the lake.

From 15 motes mts 420 around the lake from Gummers View.

GPS data to follow. Photos and misc documentation below.

DOWNLOAD for exhibitions. Park 2048 EXE version for Towneley Hall (needs XML file) here

(c) 2010

This media artwork installation exhibited at Towneley Hall Park Burnley as part of AND festival was commissioned by Folly 2010. The painterly squiggles on the image show a representation of the data, and the sounds you can hear (V2 4.3) are streams of data which the artist has turned into sound. This is made from multiple real-time wireless sensors that gather environmental data from the outside park bringing the outside data inside to explore interpretations of a real-time landscape, by creating an interactive space which is also online. The visualisation of the outside park is projected right across the back wall of the main room, including over the closed window that had the same view. The output thus creates a data telepresence. It is however not the visual placement of one thing to the next, but a manifestation of viewing and experiencing a whole landscape under its sensory attributes, an attempt to create a poetic sublime by creating an additional layer of information about the real world.

(c) 2010