The Albedo of Clouds 2008
LOCATION Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia. In group show “Mirror States”, curated by Lizzie Mueller and Kathy Cleland.
The Albedo of Clouds is an interactive experiment that takes scientific observation as a starting point but also investigates how two people see the same cloud clouds differently, how different technologies ‘see’ clouds and how clouds might sound. With one video camera positioned at Parliament House in Melbourne and one at the Melbourne Observatory, two camera operators communicated with the use of a compass and mobile phone in an attempt to film the same cloud at the same time. This process mirrored an experiment 110 years ago by Victorian scientists P. Baracchi and his colleagues, who recorded clouds simultaneously using photography, compass and telegraph to determine their height, brightness and velocity. The project also used satellite data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the new technology of remote observation during the same month the surface based clouds were filmed.
Satellite data courtesy of the Japanese Meteorological Association (JMA) and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).
Camera and Voices: Janine Randerson and Jason Johnston. ViewMIC
