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- Los Angeles Times
- January 18, 2007 Thursday
Home Edition
- THE ARTS;
GALLERIES;
An eye and ear on the Earth
With webcams and `sonification,' a UCI exhibit connects us to
our environment.
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- Shana Ting Lipton, Special to The
Times
- CALENDAR WEEKEND; Calendar Desk;
Part E; Pg. 6
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- THE sight of cars piling onto Interstate
5 is a familiar one to many. But in the multimedia art installation
"Airlight SoCal," the air pollution surrounding the
vehicles is the focal point. The freeway is depicted via a real-time
webcam, as its footage and audio mutate based on incoming smog
data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
This and other meteorological phenomena make up "Atmospherics
/ Weather Works," a retrospective of New York artist Andrea
Polli's work on display at UC Irvine's Beall Center of Art and
Technology. The show, which consists of seven installations,
is the result of her collaborations with organizations such as
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and individuals from
the scientific community here and abroad.
In a dark exhibit space illuminated mostly by video footage of
environments from the Arctic to Southern California, Polli has
taken mundane data on pollution, global warming and ecology that
might leave the average viewer befuddled and translated them
into provocative, more accessible sonic and visual works of art.
Temperatures, storm intensity and smog levels find a voice through
"sonifications," or information-conveying audio, an
opus of erratic electronic sounds that could easily make up the
score of a sci-fi movie.
But this is not "Plan 9 From Outer Space." Instead,
the exhibition is an example of the larger mixture of art and
science spreading with increased vigor at academic establishments
in the last few years.
- "Science is a contemporary
culture that's absolutely shaping our reality, and media artists
are closely linked to the same technologies that scientists use,"
says Victoria Vesna, chairwoman of the department of design and
media arts at UCLA.
- "A lot of scientists think
of themselves as artists or think of what they're doing as artistic,"
says Polli, adding that she has always felt welcomed by those
she has approached for projects.
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- One of the first members of the
scientific community to collaborate with Polli on this body of
work was New York meteorologist Glenn Van Knowe of MESO, a commercial
meteorological firm in New York. The two met at a symposium about
art and science in 2000 and germinated the seed that would become
"Atmospherics / Weather Works," the centerpiece and
namesake of the exhibit at UC Irvine. Like some retro ad for
a hi-fi system, it consists of multi-level speakers that take
up the lion's share of space in the show.
Amid this eight-channel audio cluster, visitors might be prone
to look for physical evidence of the artwork, but the crux of
the piece is the sound swell pumping out of the speakers. It
might conjure recollections of an early Brian Eno album or the
theremin-inspired effects in an episode of "Star Trek."
In actuality, it's an audio depiction of Hurricane Bob's ravaging
of the northeast U.S. in 1991 -- the product of data refashioned
as sonifications.
Originally commissioned for Engine 27, a sound gallery in New
York, the exhibit succeeded in its debut in reaching its creator's
goal: "I wanted people to be able to make an emotional connection
to the data." Polli recalls a young woman who had almost
died in the storm crying when she heard the audio piece. "Somehow
listening to the sonification -- even though it doesn't sound
like the storm itself -- made her remember it," she says.
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- Polli's propensity to seek out raw
facts, figures and configurations began at an early age; she
is the daughter of a computer scientist, and "I grew up
around computers and would program stuff all the time as a kid."
She continued to explore her scientific predilections later while
at art school, but "my art professors really looked down
on that stuff; it was commercial and geek domain."
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- Times have changed, of course. Eleanore
Stewart, director of UC Irvine's Beall Center, says today's technologies
give multimedia artists the chance to "expand human senses
so we can hear things that we as humans have never been able
to hear before and see and experience the world in new and deeper
ways."
Case in point: The installation "T2," which combines
a variety of data and operates in real time, like "Airlight
SoCal." In "T2," a video screen triptych is made
up of wind and wave data, and live webcams, from New Zealand
and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, as
well as a live feed of breaking environmental news. The periodically
updated webcams depict time-lapse animation of recent coastal
activity. And for the installation's audio component, wave data
determine the sound pitch and wind data control the harmonics.
As for what motivates Polli, she essentially defines herself
as an artist preoccupied with environments -- be they soundscapes
or landscapes. Yet she is not quick to categorize herself as
an "environmental artist," which might presume an activist's
agenda. "The bottom line of art and science is not so much
that we're going in there as watchdogs, but we're going in there
[to explore] the human dimension."
If there is a message embedded in all the data that make up the
exhibition, it may be summed up simply with Polli's parting words:
"Appreciate every breath that you can take of clean air,
because we're really lucky to have this atmosphere."
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