Wind of Boston: Data Paintings

source: vimeo
Wind of Boston: Data Paintings is a site-specific work that turns the invisible patterns of wind in and around Boston into a series of poetic data paintings within a 6’ x 13’ digital canvas. By using a one-year data set collected from Boston Logan Airport, Refik Anadol Studios developed a series of custom software to read, analyze and visualize wind speed, direction, and gust patterns along with time and temperature at 20-second intervals throughout the year.
The resulting artwork is a series of four dynamic “chapters”, each using data as a material to create a unique visual interpretation of the interaction between the environment and the city. Each chapter brings different aspects of the data sets to life with distinct and varied painterly, emotive aesthetics, making visible the invisible beauty of wind as a natural phenomenon.
Each of the four chapters focuses on one distinct characteristic of the Wind of Boston. The first chapter, Hidden Landscapes highlights the anemometer’s most radical readings to create immaterial, spatial experiences. Porcelain Memories recalls the intangible power of a gale when reimagined outside of the traditional constraints of time. Sea Breeze explores the paradox of soft gentle wind blowing from the sea to the site in the harsh cold of winter. Gust in the City is a top-view visualization that explores the phenomenon of high speed winds in short bursts and the constant unseen poetic dance between the forces of nature and the built environment.
The visualizations are custom programmed and precisely calibrated to the technical specifications of the seamless, high-resolution LED screen to create spectacular depth, rich contrast, and poetic movement within the digital canvas.
Visible daily from 8AM to 11PM from both interior and exterior, the artwork is located in the lobby of 100 Northern Avenue at Fan Pier. Commissioned by The Fallon Company to compliment the architectural design by HOK, it is the latest addition to the public art landscape of the Seaport District, also home to the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston.
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source: refikanadol

Refik Anadol is a media artist and director born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1985. Currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a lecturer and visiting researcher in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts.

He is working in the fields of site-specific public art with parametric data sculpture approach and live audio/visual performance with immersive installation approach, particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts. He holds a master of fine arts degree from University of California, Los Angeles in Media Arts, master of fine arts degree from Istanbul Bilgi University in Visual Communication Design as well as bachelors of arts degree with summa cum laude in Photography and Video. Co-founder and Creative director at Antilop.

As a media artist, designer and spatial thinker, Refik Anadol is intrigued by the ways in which the transformation of the subject of contemporary culture requires rethinking of the new aesthetic, technique and dynamic perception of space. Anadol builds his works on the nomadic subject’s reaction to and interactions with unconventional spatial orientations. Embedding media arts into architecture, he questions the possibility of a post digital architectural future in which there are no more non-digital realities. He invites the viewers to visualize alternative realities by presenting them the possibility of re-defining the functionalities of both interior and exterior architectural formations. Anadol’s work suggests that all spaces and facades have potentials to be utilized as the media artists’ canvases.

Privileging difference rather than singularity and movement rather than stasis, Anadol faces all the new challenges that the gradual development of an enriched immersive environment and ubiquitous computing impose on architects, media artists and engineers. How is our experience of space changing, now that digital objects ranging from smart phones to urban screens have all but colonized our everyday lives? How have media technologies changed our conceptualizations of space, and how has architecture embraced these shifting conceptualizations? These are the three main questions that Anadol tackles by not simply integrating media into built forms, but by translating the logic of a new media technology into spatial design.

He has been given awards, residencies and has served as a guest lecturer. He is the recipient of a number of awards, prizes including Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Award and Google’s Art and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award. His site-specific audio/visual performances have been seen in Walt Disney Concert Hall (USA), Hammer Museum (USA), International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal (Canada), Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), l’Usine | Genève (Switzerland), Arc De Triomf (Spain), Zollverein | SANAA’s School of Design Building (Germany), santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center (Turkey), Outdoor Vision Festival SantaFe New Mexico (USA), Istanbul Design Biennial (Turkey), Sydney City Art (Australia), Lichtrouten (Germany).
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source: vimeo
lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
He is an emerging artist working in the fields of live audio/visual performance, site-specific immersive installation and parametric sculpture, particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts. He holds a master of fine arts degree from University of California, Los Angeles in Media Arts, master of fine arts degree from Istanbul Bilgi University in Visual Communication Design as well as bachelors of arts degree with summa cum laude in Photography and Video. Co-founder and Creative director at Antilop.
He has been awarded numerous honours, awards, residencies and has served as a guest lecturer. His site-specific audio/visual performances have been seen in Walt Disney Concert Hall (USA), International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal (Canada), Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), l’Usine | Genève (Switzerland), Arc De Triomf (Spain), Zollverein | SANAA’s School of Design Building (Germany), santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center (Turkey), Outdoor Vision Festival SantaFe New Mexico (USA), Istanbul Design Biennial (Turkey), Sydney (Australia), Lichtrouten (Germany).