Hello, Weather! attempts to de-mystify the collection and use of weather and climate data by bringing artists, technologists, ecologists and environmentalists together around public weather stations.

Two Professional Weather stations are currently in operation in New York City as part of this project, one at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and one in partnership with the SP Weather Station project in Long Island City.

The Eyebeam site is on the West side of Manhattan, near the Hudson River and the SP Weather Station site is in Queens near the East River. Both stations are on rooftops. The stations are wireless and solar powered and transmit data to an indoor receiver that logs the data and uploads it to a computer.Data from both stations is being saved locally for archiving and use in projects.

The Eyebeam station currently participates in three volunteer weather observer projects: Weather Underground, Anything Weather and The Cooperative Weather Observer Program (CWOP), providing data that is used in local and national government and commercial forecasts and scientific research.  In addition, there is a live webcam of the station and updated online custom-formatted data.

CWOP provides a site for each station with several comma-delimited tables, rss feeds and graphical representations of the station data at various time scales: daily, weekly and monthly. They also locate the station on a variety of different maps including acme mapper, aprs, findu.com, googlemaps, pdb, teraserver, topographic and topozone.

Weather Underground provides data tables and graphical representations, and also provides a comma-delimited file of data, xml and html objects that can be placed on websites to provide quick access to the data.

Any conversation about the environment inevitably comes to the automobile.  Automobiles are essential to the lives of most New York City residents, but with these benefits come serious consequences: polluted air, dangerous roads, noise and congestion.

Chuck Varga and Cloud Car at Transportation Alternative's Park(ing) Day September 19th, 2008, click on picture for more

The connection between the automobile, life and air in NewYork City is explored through Cloud Car, a car fitted with special effects equipment that produces a cloud of mist, enveloping car and rider. As a public artwork, Cloud Car focuses attention on air and the automobile with a cloud of mist.  Air is made tangible and visible.

 At designated times, in-person guides will be stationed near the car, distributing fact sheets related to air quality issues and encouraging passers-by to discuss the environment, automobiles and traffic in the city.  Visitors will be invited to sit in the car accompanied by a guide and listen to sound compositions related to the environment on the car stereo. The car becomes as a semi-private space of contemplation and exchange.  

Scheduled dates and locations:

September 19th - Park(ing) day test drive, 21st street and 43rd Avenue, Long Island City Queens

October 18th, 12-6PM - Eyebeam Block Party, Chelsea in conjunction with The Ear to the Earth Festival

November 1st, 10AM-3PM - The New York Hall of Science, Queens in conjunction with The Ear to the Earth Festival

By Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga.

This project is made possible (in part) with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts, administered by the Queens Council on the Arts

 

 

A model to repurpose private infrastructure - such as scaffolding-, to create free space.

 

The Wildest Animal is an on-going project about imagine new ways of living with our waste and how to domesticate it.

 

Buckys are a series of snowglobes about the hopeless possibilities of sustainability based on consumption and green capitalism.

Bucky I from ChocolateRobot on Vimeo.

Tanda Foundation is a freestyle non for profit, that merges the logic of 501(c)(3) organizations and the tanda model, to create a web 2.0 social network that harness the power generated by large amount of people, to collect micro-funds towards the support of creative practice.

 

 

The Lightcoder is a symbolic object that explores the possibilities of survival in an urban environment, bringing attention to the vulnerability of digital technology and embracing its entropy through alternative interaction that don't rely on dominant technologies.
The Lightcoder is an analog communication device. A "rebozo"-style bag, made out of reflective mylar that use natural or artificial light to encode messages into morse code.
The Pocket LightCoder is a free tool. If you need one for your survival kit, shoot an email to: jerry@eyebeam.org

The Great Wikimarathon is a one-day event that unites art lovers around the world in an attempt to collectively fill in the gaps of contemporary art knowledge found on wikipedia. The WikiMarathon is is a recurrent and uncentralized, happening everytime a weekend lands on the 26th of a month, since marathons are 26 miles long. Participants gather locally, at house parties and coffee shops in their neighborhood, to brainstorm and create content on contemporary and new media artists and programs. These small local groups then gather online in an open chat to streamline productivity and help each other edit their Wikipedia posts.

This project started out as the Milkscanner (as described on instructables). The basic idea behind this process is that you can capture the silhouette of an object easily when it is surrounded by a high contrast fluid, such as milk or ink.
When lowering the object into the fluid, the silhouette changes gradually, as the fluid obstructs more and more of the objects shape. By capturing the silhouette of an object at different stages of submersion, one can generate slices, that, if properly stacked together, can be interpreted as 3D data.

Here's a documentation video of a recent inkscanning performance:

inkscanner @ eyebeam Mixer from Friedrich Kirschner on Vimeo.