Expanding our partnership with CJ.MY at their 3rd annual conference
Document Actions
stormchasers
This video is documentation of a video art installation at MIC Toi Rerehiko gallery in 2008. Video sources include the distributed creativity of stormchase videos on YouTube from Australia and New Zealand and images of storms in the Asia-Pacific region of visible light, water vapour and infrared satellite weather maps. The latter were produced in collaboration with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. I hope the work will continue to be re-edited and shared online.
01:06
- Genres
- Categories
- Keywords
- Country
- Language
| Video information | |
|---|---|
| Produced by | Janine Randerson |
| Directed by | Janine Randerson |
| Contact | write the producer |
| Home page | more info |
| Produced | Dec 03, 2008 |
Full Description
Janine Randerson, Stormchasers (2008), video, sound.
Jason Johnston, sound composition
Mike Wilmott, satellite data extraction
YouTube Creators; dogeatdog, cambria12, vidmem, forlorn, complexsimon, astromansid, mleg, clunesley.
The collection of storm data by satellite meteorologists is statistical and controlled, while the tactics of the storm-chaser are opportunistic and experiential - a vertiginous race for immersion in the atmosphere. Since the advent of You-Tube, personal video records of storms and storm-chasing (typically involving a car speeding along beside a storm with a camera thrust out of the window) have been made publicly accessible on the internet. Certain subgeneric conventions emerge when comparing online storm-chasing videos. For instance, storm-chasers often use public images of remote-sensed weather maps as an introduction to their reality-TV style pursuit of hurricanes, tornadoes or cyclones. And some weather enthusiasts use specialised equipment – such as the Strike Alert Personal Lightning Detector (2007), which uses electrical interference created by lightning and an LED warning device – to generate instant alerts if thunder and lightning is nearby.
Stormchasers, the installation, features hemispherical vignettes of storm-chasing videos that have been uploaded to YouTube from New Zealand and Australia. The definition of the storm-chase is broad here, but whether the footage depicts a violent storm filmed from the bedroom window or a madcap dash across the desert, it is always accompanied by a soundtrack of awe and excitement. Stormchasers also features animated imagery of visible light, water vapour and infrared satellite weather maps derived from the Japanese satellite MET-Sat2. These graphics chronicle a temporally condensed version of the week in April 2008 when Cyclone Nargis crossed the Asia-Pacific region.
Storm-chases create a visual spectacle, but they are also a sign of the times. The havoc and displacement created by tropical and subtropical storms have a profound effect on human and non-human ecologies. Increasingly intense cyclones may become a permanent fixture in both New Zealand and the wider Pacific – a phenomenon that will no doubt continue to be followed by scientists via remote-sensed data, and by storm-chasers on the ground.
- Janine Randerson
http://mic.org.nz/events/exhibitions/past/twothousandandeight/atmos/
