City of Oklahoma City Artscapes (Public Art), 28 Apr 2016

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From YouTube: Artscapes - "Small Talk About the Weather"

Description

The Central Oklahoma Transportation and Parking Authority (COTPA) unveiled the interactive public art project “Small Talk About the Weather” in the pedestrian corridor of its Arts District Garage in celebration of its 50th Anniversary.

The installation consists of nine bands that swirl along the length of the pedestrian corridor of the garage. LED lights illuminate the bands and display synchronized patterns; an artistic representation of Doppler radar images from Oklahoma City’s historic cloud and storm patterns into an artistic representation of the city’s weather.

“When our team visited Oklahoma City, we were struck by how often people greeted one another with a comment about the current weather condition, whether it be windy, cold, rainy or with a chance of severe storms,” says artist Joe O’Connell of Creative Machines. “Because of its changing nature, the weather in Oklahoma City is ever present and becomes a part of daily conversations. We were inspired by the playful question about what it would be like to control the weather.”

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Driving from the airport to Oklahoma, City and then just being indoors and outdoors and talking to people just made me think what is it like to live out life under this vast sky that, at a short notice, could bring totally different whether to live under this huge sky, with rapidly changing weather that can so change? Your life seem to be one of the salient characteristics of living in Oklahoma City when they're just walking down the hall overhead. The art piece is essentially playing video Noah footage of weather from this historical footage from this region.

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That's just the background. That's just clouds drifting across the the sky and there's a bright lip button above the sensor, you press the button and for a minute. The sensor then replaces that note of footage with whatever it sees in front of it. So you moving around you there's a little ledge! You can set your cell phone. There is a opportunity to get really close to it or back from it.

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So if you have something that makes light, you can set it right on the ledge, something like your clothes or your scarf or your mittens, or something that reflects light. You want to keep it away a little bit so that the light the surrounding light has a chance to bounce off it onto the sensor and then, if you want to keep it going, you just press that button after minute it blinks to let it know that let you know that it's picking up from the sensor I wanted to build in this interactive control.

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That would let you feel like, as you wave your hands over a sensor. It's your hand, that's moving those clouds and images across the sky, so I always really respect a human impulse to control and alter because I think, although we talk now about the virtues of respecting and just listening and watching, I think we're fundamentally doers as people so for this piece in particular, I could see it being a catalyst for a group of people walking through and just experimenting like. Oh I, have my this team logo or I.

A

Hey I made this video of flowers in my garden, and here it is I, think art both communicate something to people, and then it gives them a sphere in which they can communicate with each other. If you go on a date with somebody, you don't just set up two chairs and look across you go to a movie, there's always a third thing in the room or you have a meal. So you have something to talk about or you go to a comedy club or something like that.

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Art is that third person in the room is that object in that room that helps people connect to each other, and you don't see as much of that in the built environment when you're a kid, you have a playground, but when your adult, what do you have small talk about? The weather is it's mostly acrylic and those scales are acrylic. Acrylic and silicone to a lesser extent, are the two plastics that diffuse light, but will also hold up almost indefinitely with UV exposure.

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So there's little silicone washers that let the scales kind of flow, so it's not just metal on metal. There's little silicone washers between each sheet. All the hardware is stainless steel and then everything is suspended by stainless steel cable. What you see there is actually thousands of pieces of acrylic that we routed out on our CNC router modeled on the computer and then I built a jig, and we had very fastidious assemblers. There are people in our company who really like detailed work, just screw them together and the jig made it fast.

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So they look like continuous, smooth strips and that's what they're intended to be, but just like the air or a cloud as many tiny particles, there are over 2,500 individual plastic and metal parts up there in the ceiling making that affect the contrast between color and motion and an underground cement tunnel in a parking garage as part of it makes it work. I think it's the difference between the environment and what you put in it.

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