GEV III : Weather System (v)

The final generative installation of the God's Eye View series, exploring the approximation of weather modelling.

Three projections exploring facets of the symbolic order imposed on human experience of the world, God’s Eye View both celebrates and questions the wisdom of attempting prediction.

Enlisting the aid of the Met Office, these works offer up the mechanisms employed for the visual mapping of the virtually invisible for consideration. Struck by the inadvertent beauty of systems created to ease understanding of a complex world, Cotterrell here replicates the language of predictive modelling to highlight what is lost (and gained) through the process of translation.

Working with a set of climatic statistics to predict possible future weather systems, isobars continuously create new patterns, metamorphosing the reality of a tornado into an agreeable aesthetic experience. At times, the audience is reminded of the behaviour of flocking birds or lemmings as we see human choice and naturally occurring patterns reduced to game-like conditions.The quest for God-like status is brought down to earth by the limitations imposed by humanity’s collective imagination: prediction machines are only capable of replicating identified trends. Our inability to witness all of the convolutions of life is reduced to an abstraction: a translation or ‘Beginner’s Guide’ to this shared existence.

Materials:

Data Projector, PC and Custom software