Rick Gribenas

Random Sky

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2006

A collaboration with Iñigo Manglano Ovalle and Mark Hereld.

7680 × 1024 resolution Continuous real-time digital output; single channel,

10-projection screens; weather transmitter with temperature, barometric,

wind speed and direction instrumentation; and 7 channel sound.

Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL

This large scale digital projection uses live weather information taken from a weathervane fixed

to the front of the Art Center to determine the motion and pattern of the composition. Random

Sky is a digital program that generates random calculations in real-time. Its performance

maintains a degree of unpredictability informed by external data culled from the weather

instruments located on the exterior of the art center. Projected as oscillating vertical blue and

white bands across the center’s glass façade Random Sky results in tendencies rather than

wholly predetermined narratives. The project is a semi-permanent installation literally wired in

the building’s physical as well as digital infrastructure. It is meant to reside within and without

the architecture of the center and to be called upon at any moment.

“Weather writes, erases, and rewrites itself upon the sky with the fluidity of language; it is with

language that we have sought throughout history to apprehend it.”

—Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds,

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

 

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