Eyes on the Sky

source: jedcartercouk

I made a book. It documents my major self-initiated project this year: a process-based investigation into generative design and the weather. It’s a record of the sky, of the colours that change so slowly it’s almost impossible to see. A bit like a visual almanac.

I linked 64 public-access web cameras across Europe, recording the colour of the sky, at each point, at regular intervals. Together, the cameras paint the weather, once every hour. The book collects a week of paintings.

What began as a project investigating data visualisation, turned into a project exploring painting. Hidden amongst the changing hues, are glitches, imperfections and accidents caused by the lenses themselves. Eyes on the sky, painting by numbers.

Colour

This project was inspired by a simple observation: weather conditions can be revealed by the quality and colour of light through a window. A soft, blue light falls in overcast conditions in the winter, when the Sun is weak and far away. On a warm summer day, light is bright and tinged with red.

With regards to forecasting the weather, I believe that most people respond more intuitively to simple colours than to the complex units of data found in weather reports and downloadable apps. My phone can instantly inform me of the current temperature outside in degrees of Celsius, but this reading tells me nothing of how warm or cold it actually feels. How warm is 18°C, exactly? Does that mean I need a jumper or a coat? We can access a multitude of different kinds of data relating to the weather, but can this information be used to create something beautiful or intuitive to read?

Drawing

Over the past couple of years, I have developed an increasing curiosity in the field of generative design, a process by which the designer creates a system, which is then fulfilled by an automated machine to produce one or many final outcomes. A designer might create a program that draws an artificial tree, changing the parameters of the tree with each iterative drawing to reflect the diversity that exists within nature. My earliest experiments were with simple digital drawing machines (while working through the excellent book Generative Design, available here. Each line could be drawn using very simple rules. For example, the lines follow the path of the cursor, or travel away from the cursor at changeable angles. As the rules become more complex, more sophisticated drawings can be created.

The weather itself is a system, a huge network of changing pressures and banks of cloud, constantly interacting with each other to create variations in temperature, precipitation, wind and humidity. I was intrigued by the prospect of revealing this system, particularly in a way that generated a visual product.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was a Romantic painter, known for his hazy watercolour landscapes. I think one particular strength of his paintings are the atmosphere they create. His applications of colour create very abstract impressions.

Turner seemed less concerned with painting specific places than with the dramatic possibilities of sea and air, and with the motion of the elements. In contrast to the objective scientific data presented by weather forecasting services, Turner’s paintings evoke an emotional response to the environment. Could I create a system that presented weather data with similar dramatic effect?

Data

I was also interested in how generative approaches to graphic design could be applied in a practical way. Field are a design studio in London, specialising in interactive digital installations, such as their project ‘10,000 Digital Paintings’: “Invited to inspire the design community about the unlimited possibilities of digital print and generative design, FIELD created 10,000 unique cover artworks for the 2011 edition of paper manufacturer GF Smith’s legendary brochures. Each sleeve features a different view on a hypercomplex sculpture, generated through a process pairing generative coding with creative intuition. The energy of a dynamic process – caught in a timeless medium,” (from Field’s project description).

The digital paintings are based on random shapes. With each print, the viewpoint, structure and colour of the shape changes randomly. The rules dictating this were programmed into a piece of software that could create many more visual iterations of the shape than any human, meaning that each print is completely unique, echoing the premium message of the client. The strength of generative design is in creating automated variations of something: visuals that are dynamic and can react to certain parameters.

The visual identity for the Nordkyn tourist board, for example, changes to represent the current weather in Nordkyn, northern Norway. The creators, Neue, explain: “The visual identity is based on two main ingredients; our newly developed payoff, “Where nature rules,” and weather statistics from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. A feed of weather statistics affects the logo to change when the direction of the wind or the temperature changes. On the website, the logo updates every five minutes. Nordkyn is truly a place where nature rules, even over the visual identity,” (Neue project description).

The Nordkyn mark is interesting because it rejects the traditional notion of a static logo, instead using a procedural mark that directly expresses weather conditions in a way that creates a unique visual brand. These approaches transform dull or incomprehensible data into something warm, engaging and fantastic.

Digital Stories

Inspired by rock formations that are shaped and eroded by wind and rain, I explored creating physical sculptures generated from the weather conditions at a specific place. The sculptures digitally ‘grow’ as the day progresses, dynamically altering their shape to reflect changes in temperature, wind direction and the colour of the sky. In the same way that stalagmites are formed from the slow build up of limestone sediment in drops of water, the sculptures could be printed layer by layer, using 3D printing technology, providing a visual record of a day’s weather (this part of the project is still work-in-progress, will post an update soon)

How can data be used to tell a story? James Bridle’s project ‘A Ship Adrift’ takes a weather station atop a London hotel and uses measurements of wind to power an imaginary air-ship, piloted by a lost, mad artificial intelligence. The craft plots its fictional course across Google Maps, changing direction, slowing down and speeding up as the wind in London does the same, creating an adventure powered by both the wind and the imagination of the viewer.

Roni Horn’s photographic series ‘Still Water (The River Thames, for Example)’, images focuses on a small area of the surface of the river Thames. The colour and texture of these watery surfaces varies dramatically between images: colours range from black to blue and from dark green to khaki-yellow, and in each case the water’s texture is differently augmented by tidal movement and the play of light. By focusing on a single subject over a long period of time, Horn shows us the huge variations in the river’s appearance, changes that can sometimes be too slow for the human eye to recognise. These projects give us a new perspective on their subjects, allowing us to explore them in a way we would not be able to otherwise.

Network Vision

The images collected in this book are created using a generative system. Using a php script, images were downloaded from 64 public-access webcams across Europe. Some are amateur weather-stations, some are maintained by hotels or universities. Each recorded the sky every hour, taking 24 snapshots every day. The colour of the sky was extracted from these photographs as numeric values of red, green and blue, then plotted back to a geographic map, forming an image of the sky that extends beyond a single perspective. This is network vision, seeing through many lenses at once.

The webcams vary drastically in position, direction and the quality of the images they capture. Webcams facing East and West record the intense reds and yellows of sunrises and sunsets. Each webcam has a different sensitivity to light, each interpreting the blackness of night as various shades and hues of grey. Many cameras have uncalibrated white-balance settings, saving photographs that contain unexpected greens and yellows.

Often, London and Paris have an orangey-purple hue at night. Hannover is a bright white during night hours, the result of light refracting through a spider’s web infront of the camera, woven throughout the day. Svalbard is so far north that it never fully reaches darkness. A strange mix of expected and unexpected results.

The glitches and photographic mistakes become part of a painting process, where the cameras add their own idiosyncrasies to the image; a network of imperfect eyes.

Here’s a flick-through of the book, containing a sequence of images documenting the sky every hour for 7 days, from the 29th April to the 5th May 2013. If you click through to Vimeo, it’s available in HD.

This text is a modified version of the appendix in the aforementioned book. The book is on display at the Kingston University Degree Show, until 21st June 2013, and Work Out exhibition, London 27th-29th June 2013.

Many thanks to Richard Brauer, for an enormous amount of help with the coding of this project.
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source: wired

The sky you see in Lisbon, Portugal, is not the same sky you see in London—at least not when viewed through the lens of a weather camera. The images captured on these cameras show an unexpected array of reds, blues, grays and greens, but what does the color of the sky really say about the weather we’re experiencing? In Eyes on the Sky, Jed Carter takes data gathered from 64 public access cameras across Europe and turns it into a gorgeously abstract book about the continent’s weather. “I wanted to focus on how data, which is generally not intuitive or legible, can be transformed into something beautiful,” says the London-based graphic designer.

“I wanted to focus on how data can be transformed into something beautiful.”
Using a PHP script, Carter downloaded images from weather cameras ranging from Svalbard, Norway to Costa Del Sol, Spain, every hour for seven days. He then extracted the sky’s color from a pixel from each photograph and plotted the RGB value on a geographic map to form a paint-by-numbers picture. The grid of camera images are blended into the watercolor smear of blues, grays and greens you see in the book using an algorithm that Carter developed. “We spent a while tweaking the blending algorithm, getting a balance between a smooth color fade and being able to clearly discern the individual colors,” he explains. The result is 168 pages of moody, atmospheric blurs that paint an unique picture of Europe’s weather.

The hazy watercolor of skies you see varies greatly depending on time of day, weather and position of the camera. Each page shows a snapshot of time; as you flip through the book, you begin to notice the transition from day to night and the difference in time zones across the continent. Carter notes that webcams facing east and west captured the warm reds and yellows of sunrise and sunset, while others produce bizarre whites and greens due to unexpected glitches and poor camera quality. “The webcam for Hannover produces very bright white images at night,” he says. “This is because there’s a spider’s web over the camera lens, spun during the day.”

Eyes on the Sky grew out of an app Carter is developing that would take weather data and translate it to gradients. Most of today’s weather apps value functionality, using complex data and numbers to convey what it feels like outdoors, and earlier iterations of Eyes on the Sky were similar—Carter experimented with showing Europe’s coastline and national borders as well as making the data more “legible.” Ultimately, he determined that people can intuitively glean information from the colors of the sky, even if it meant the project wouldn’t be a totally accurate representation of the weather. “In the end I felt a more abstract, atmospheric image worked better,” he says. “After all, weather doesn’t honor national boundaries.”
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source: slowalktistory

유난히 높아 보이는 맑은 하늘과 구름 덕분에 하루에도 몇번이나 하늘을 올려다보게 되는 가을입니다. 그래서 오늘은 하늘에 관한 주제로 얘기를 시작해 볼까 합니다. 여러분 “날씨 데이터” 하면 뭐가 떠오르시나요? 온도, 섭씨, 구름, 우산 등 정보를 표현해주는 단위나 픽토그램이 떠오르실 텐데요. 구글에 “Weather Data”라고 검색해보아도, 우리가 예상했던 이미지가 보입니다.

이러한 날씨 데이터를 색다르게 표현한 작가가 있어 소개 합니다. 영국의 그래픽 디자이너 제드카터(Jed Carter)인데요. 그는 창문으로 들어오는 빛과 색상으로 그날 날씨를 표현할 수 있다는 간단한 관찰로부터 영감을 받고, 프로젝트를 시작하게 되었다고 합니다.

소프트한 푸른빛은 날씨가 흐린 겨울, 태양이 약하고 멀리 있을 때 보이며, 따뜻한 여름날에는 적색이 밝게 비친다고 하네요. 그럼 그의 프로젝트를 살펴볼까요?

제드카터가 관찰한 하늘의 모습은 “eyes on the sky”란 책으로 보여지는데요. 이 책은 7일 동안(2013/4/29~2013/5/5)의 유럽의 하늘 색상을 기록한 데이터입니다. 방법은 파리, 암스테르담, 하노버 등 유럽 전역에 걸쳐 64개의 웹캠에서 색상을 추출한 다음, 사진 속 하늘을 픽셀컬러로 추출합니다. 추출된 컬러는 지리적 위치에 기반을 두어 그 지역의 하늘을 색상으로 표현합니다. 같은 시간대의 각 지역의 하늘색을 비교해 볼 수 있는 것이지요.

캠으로 찍은 사진들에는 어떤 것들이 있는지 살펴볼까요?

오렌지빛 보라색을 띠는 런던의 밤하늘

낮 동안 쳐놓은 거미줄 때문에 흰색으로 보이는 하노버의 밤하늘

캠의 화이트 밸런스로 인해 그린 빛으로 보이는 암스테르담의 하늘

이렇게 각 지역에 배치된 웹캠의 시스템과 환경이 달라 작가가 예상치 못한 사진들도 있었다고 하는데요. 작가는 이런 해프닝도 프로젝트 일부분이라 생각하고, 작업을 진행하였다고 합니다. 그럼 영상으로 유럽의 하늘을 감상해 볼까요?

우리가 미처 발견하지 못했던 하늘의 다양한 변화를 영상으로 느껴볼 수 있었는데요. 그럼 오늘 여러분이 계신 곳의 하늘은 어떨지 관찰하는 여유를 가져보는 건 어떨까요?