N. - ANDREA POLLI + JOE GILMORE
Installation / Talk - Site Gallery
[April 13 2005 - June 18 2005]
(See Site Gallery Exhibition opening page for more on N.)


N. is an artistic visualization and sonification (direct translation of data to sound) of near real-time Arctic information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Arctic research program. According to NASA climate scientists, a dramatic warming trend has been experienced by the Arctic over the last decade that may accelerate global climate change. The N. installation expresses the isolation and environmental extremes of this remote region and addresses the importance of the region to the global ecosystem.

A portion of the raw sound material used in N. comes from live sferics (short for atmospherics), global electromagnetic transmissions of lightning. The INSPIRE VLF (very low frequency) receiver at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is the source for this live audio stream.


N. Talk - Lovebytes 05

N. also makes use of a custom, open source object for Max/MSP called Datareader designed by Andrea Polli and Kurt Ralske. Datareader is designed to automatically input and use scientific tables of data in real time to alter imagery and sound. N. is an ongoing, evolving composition. Directly tied to the turbulent weather of the Pole, the composition is ever changing, transforming in completely unexpected ways.


Image from the North Pole

In the tradition of art works like On Kawara's One Million Years, Agnes Denes' Tree Mountain-A Living Time Capsule and Jem Finer's Longplayer 1000-year sound composition, N. unfolds and evolves on a climatological temporal scale, a scale far beyond an individual human lifetime.

Joe Gilmore
"I work with sound and compose digitally as well, but for the past year and a half I've been working on a project called rand()% - that's an internet radio station which broadcasts generative music. Meaning music which is generated in real time and is never the same, always evolving. The station streams different artists and programmers work from all over the world. That was commissioned by Huddersfield Media Center. Before that I had an interest in generating music from random numbers or external sources. After starting this radio station I started playing around with ideas of using things like the weather, and anything you could really get data from to change parameters in sound. I like hearing stuff that I haven't heard before and I like giving up a certain amount of responsibility or control over what's happening. I did a piece in Huddersfield, which used a Geiger counter, which was picking up radioactive particle decay, and using the space between those decays to generate random numbers. It's basically truly random because you can't predict when a particle will decay. And that kind of evolved into this really.

www.rand.org
Joe Gilmore at Lovebytes 05

If you're going to use weather to make music, where do you choose, local weather, like Sheffield? Using the North Pole seemed extreme and for me it's almost kind of mythical, magical, where Father Christmas is from. So in terms of changing an environment to sonify, that is a place where most people don't go. It's not like we're trying to recreate a one to one sense of being there.

We're not using all sounds, there's an amount of artist freedom in terms of what we're using and how far we're abstracting what's going on so its almost like we're using one model to construct a completely different environment, which is modulated by the data."




Alan Jackson
"The artists believe that global warming is happening but from what I understand the data received today from the North Pole can't support, or be against that argument. So the political positions of the artists in my opinion are not stated by the work. I found it better than most video art."

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Andrea Polli at Lovebytes 05

"Relating to this piece, I've been working since 2001 with meteorologists and climatologists doing sonifications of weather and climate data. This is the first piece that I've done using live, networked information. I'm usually working with a meteorologist who lives in Missouri, he's a tornado and snow specialist. He's creating a model of the weather at the North Pole that he's updating every 12 hours for us and I'm particularly interested to be working with Joe because he has done so many projects including rand()%, with networked data and information. I met Joe online. I had to develop some open source software for precious work, and so made it available and Joe gave me a link for someone who'd link to it and then we just emailed and I went to see his piece at Huddersfield last November.

For me my previous projects have been using archived information and historical information – like I did a piece on an historical hurricane in the New York area. Now we're actually looking at what's happening right now. It's pretty important looking at the North Pole because the temperature at the pole has already changed in the last 10 years, 10 degrees down. The Kyoto treaty is talking about 2 degrees change as been major, so what's happening at the poles is just off the scales. It's something to really look at, what's happening now, this season.

From the exhibition, in terms of data I'm expecting there to be quite a transformation in the sound, over the course of the 10 weeks that the shows going to be up. They're saying in the next 2 years the entire ice shelf of the north pole will melt in the summer, completely, so I think there's going to be quite a dramatic change and I think it will be reflected in the sounds that people hear in the space. I think it's the underlined message of the piece, besides being a beautiful aesthetic, and thinking about the pole, this is kind of a disappearing landscape."

Bryony Broom, Voluntary Sector:
at the N. Talk/opening.

"I think the sound piece is fantastic and I shall come again and again. Last week I was in a room with David Bellamy and loads of environmentalists and this is loads easier actually."