Year
2015
Tag
Installations
Weather is usually experienced in passing. A warm day, a wet month, a season that arrives differently from the one before it. A record keeps these changes available after the sensation has gone.
Nature of Data translated meteorological and geographical information about France into ceramic installations. One acoustic arrangement invited visitors to touch water held inside shallow ceramic vessels. The contact triggered rain sounds associated with a particular month and place, heard through headphones.
2015 · Galerie Schirner Zang Foundation · Art & Research / Installations.
The distance between a day and a pattern
A temperature reading belongs to a moment. An average belongs to a different kind of time. It brings many moments together, allowing a pattern to appear while letting the particular circumstances of each observation recede.
The work moved between those scales. Monthly temperatures and periods of rainfall formed part of the information translated into the installation. Ceramic forms and repeated arrangements offered a way to stay with these relationships, without the continual replacement of one image by the next.
Visitors examine the sequence of ceramic vessels.
Colour, spacing and repetition in the ceramic installation.
Touching a record
The acoustic installation began with a small movement towards the surface of the water. A visitor touched a vessel and listened. The ceramic held the water; the sound carried attention towards a month and a place beyond the room.
The gesture connected three different experiences of rain: the water immediately under the fingertips, the sound arriving through headphones, and the distant conditions to which that sound referred. Moving between vessels meant moving between these situated accounts. The record became something to approach, activate and spend time with.
Grouped white volumes form another arrangement within the exhibition.
Detail of the repeated ceramic units.
Giving a record duration
Ceramics brought another timescale into the work. Information gathered from changing conditions was held in objects that remained. The installation made that passage between an unstable environment and a stable representation available for consideration.
A material cannot contain the whole weather. It can offer a particular account of it, made through choices about what to measure and how to give those measurements form. Nature of Data asked what becomes easier to notice when a record occupies a room and asks us to spend time beside it.
How it was made
For the acoustic installation, shallow water-filled ceramic vessels were arranged along a shelf. Touching the water triggered the rain sound associated with a specific month and place, heard through headphones. The diagram focuses on this interaction rather than the other ceramic arrangements shown in the exhibition photographs.
The acoustic installation: touching water in a ceramic vessel triggered the sound of rain associated with a specific month and place, heard through headphones. Explanatory reconstruction based on the installation photograph and Pau’s account; internal sensing and playback hardware is not specified.
References
- Original DDS case study — Original project description and photographic record.
- DDS exhibition and events archive — Dated event listing.
A project by Domestic Data Streamers. Images selected from the original project and exhibition archives.
