Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson
“At any one time there are around 6,000 lightening storms happening across the world amounting to some 16 million storms each year.”
… a delicious fact is culled from Pippa Irvine’s review of Paterson’s Street Light Storm installation on Deal Pier on FAD Fast Art News:
Inspired by such dizzying statistics Paterson set about translating this natural phenomena into a poetic and beautiful artwork on Deal Pier in Kent. Harnessing everyday technology, lightening signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africa are received by an antenna on the pier and projected as short bursts of light. As the pattern of lightening strikes changes, so the pier lights oscillate correspondingly, with a subtlety that contrasts with the power and drama of the storms they reflect.
To watch the pier by night is a genuinely magical experience with each flash anticipated with mounting tension. Every sporadic burst is accompanied by an appreciative emotional thrill and a sense of awe at the fact that somewhere out there the ominous rumbles of thunder and lightening are mounting. The work connects spectators to the vastness of the world beyond, collapsing the distance between the individual and remote meteorological events.
It’s an interesting way of making art that represents scientific data in an open-ended way. Paterson turns Deal Pier a kind of lightning rod for the world; the romantic-era majesty of a lightening storm is reduced to data, but then remade as flickers of light.
The artwork was originally intended to run throughout January but has apparently gone down so well that it’ll remain there until February 14, weekdays 5-10pm, weekends 5pm-8am.
www.katiepaterson.org/streetlightstorm/
Hard science vs harder politics
You can find yourself feeling sorry for UK home secretary Alan Johnson, currently embroiled in a messy fracas with his own former scientific advisor on drugs. In the rough and tumble of pre-election politics, an evidence-based drug policy which advocates the downgrading of the status of cannabis and ecstasy can become kind of inconvenient.
It’s not hard to imagine a similar situation arising with climate change.
Maybe it already has.
When the government’s former chief scientist Sir David King said back in 2005 that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels needed to stabalise at the level of 550 parts per million there were activists and scientists who were shocked at how high he’d pegged the figure. David King later explained that it would be “politically unrealistic” to demand anything lower.
Sir David King clearly had a better understanding than the sacked Professor David Nutt of what constitutes “science” in the political context.
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Future RSA Events- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - State of Emergency October 20, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Reporting Live From The End of the World October 15, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Dispatches from the Dark Side -The Death Of Justice October 8, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay October 7, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - The Wavewatcher's Companion October 5, 2010