Flight
2016
4 channel data-driven animation, silent
Collaborators: Paul Paradiso, Marina Zurkow
Production and animation: Sarah Rothberg
Weather programming: Sam Brenner
Flight data: generously provided by FlightAware and FlightStats
Bird data: eBird
Weather data: FlightAware
Commissioned by Borusan Contemporary

DESCRIPTION

Flight (IST, JFK, LAX, LHR) explores the notion of “air” through both poetic and practical views. The custom data-driven application animates a vision of what populates the proximate airspace in real time. Airplanes and satellites on schedules, up-to-the-minute weather conditions, voluntarily reported bird sightings, less credible but nonetheless “real” databases for UFOs, and averaged data on bats and less desirable birds such as pigeons and starlings compose the world of Flight.

The current data landscape for Flight reflects the following airports: Istanbul (IST), London Heathrow (LHR), Los Angeles (LAX), and New York (JFK).  Flight contemplates the complex interface between the skies above our heads, and the ways in which we fragment and record it as instrumental data, poetic data, and ambient data.

The ecologically inclusive approach of Flight continues the work in Zurkow’s Mesocosm series: animated, specific landscapes that unfold, blending the “natural” and the anthropogenic, natural science and fantasy via a slow, algorithmic trajectory.

Flight currently runs on Open Frameworks as a site-specific installation.