I am currently living in post-Katrina New Orleans as I write this proposal and hurricane season is just one week away. “Project Beaufort Scale” is a video installation of an ice cube melting in Tokyo controlled by information related to the current weather in New Orleans. Specifically, the data sets correspond to the wind speed which will control the duration, speed and direction of the video.
To me, the ice cube melting (video) relates to the natural and man-made disaster that devastated New Orleans during and after Katrina. By networking this video to wind data captured by a weather station in New Orleans, two locations will be connected visually and temporally. Like the dérive, or drift, defined by the situationists, which could have no end, this video could loop endlessly bringing into questing the laws of thermodynamics, entropy and dislocation
The video will be viewed on an LCD screen attached to a CPU, with Flash using RSS and XML feeds. The work will need a network connection either wired or wireless (wired is preferred).
Video one is an example of the ice cube melting
Video two show the video used in an interactive installation that uses an ultrasonic sensor to control speed and direction. This is not the proposed artwork but is a good example of how the video will react to wind data.