“To Let” Exhibition and SPWS Twilight Talk, Ithaca NY

“To Let” Exhibition

Opening reception Friday, July 3rd from 4-6PM!
(Walking tours depart at 4:30pm and 5:30pm)
Bernie Milton Pavilion, Ithaca Commons, Ithaca NY

Followed by a Twilight Talk by SP Weather Station: ”Taxonomy of Taxonom(ies) of Clouds,” Ithaca Commons Amphitheater ~ 9 PM

“To Let” is a collaborative community project that invites landlords to temporarily donate the use of unrented retail spaces to the program and engages artists to create installations in storefront windows. (more info: http://toletartprogram.blogspot.com/)

Organized and curated by The Working Relationship, sponsored by the Downtown Ithaca Alliance, and supported by local landlords, ”To Let” features projects by local, regional and national artists. The first round of to Let presents works by SP Weather Station (Natalie Campbell, Heidi Neilson & Daniel Larson), Jessica Evett-Miller, Lindsey Glover, Roman Hrab, M. Michelle Illuminato, Paul M. Nicholson, Tom Oberg and others.   Projects include the “Weather Metabulator,” using real time weather data to create output using an adapted, vintage medical device; “A Plastic Garden” turning cast-off materials and donated plastic flowers into a growing diorama; “Night and Day” using sound and images of surveillance to investigate privacy in public spaces; and “Colonial Left” displaying objects of the Colonial style to question their meaning in our lives.

The SPWS Weather Metabulator is on view in the 208 E. State Street storefront.

SPWS Guest Lecture 3/1/09: 3 Weather Talks in the Panorama!

In conjunction with the Queens International 4 at the Queens Museum of Art

SP Weather Station Guest Lecture series presents:

3 Weather Talks in the Panorama

Sunday, March 1st, 2:00 PM (repeats at 4:00*)
(open to the public / museum admission is $5 suggested donation)

Isaac Gertman
NYC Weather Apocalypse in Film

Kenneth Goldsmith
reads from his book “The Weather”

SP Weather Station
Clouds of New York Slideshow

Queens Museum of Art
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
for details/directions: www.queensmuseum.org/information/

(*4:00 PM program by Isaac Gertman & SP Weather Station only)

About Isaac Gertman: 
Isaac Gertman is a designer, educator, and occasional writer. He has written for STEP Magazine and the design blog SpeakUp. He has taught typography at the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently teaches environmental graphic design at Parsons the New School for Design. Isaac received a masters degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and a bachelors from Maryland Institute College of Art. His work will be featured in the book A Thousand Tips by a Hundred Graphic Designers, released by Spanish publisher Maomao  in 2009. He lives in Brooklyn, and has no plans to ever move to Manhattan. (http://www.isaacgertman.com/)

About Kenneth Goldsmith:
Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing has been called some of the most “exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. The author of seven books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (http://ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, Goldsmith is also the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. More about Goldsmith can be found on his author’s page at the University of Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center:http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith. 

About SP Weather Station:
SP Weather Station is an artist-run weather station based on a studio rooftop in Long Island City, New York. Co-founded by Natalie Campbell and Heidi Neilson in 2007, SP Weather Station is an interdisciplinary project which collects weather data, hosts a Guest Lecture Series, and produces artist multiples. As an informal umbrella organization, SPWS invites participation from many other artists, groups, and weather enthusiasts. http://spweatherstation.net

In conjunction with its participation in the Queens International 4, SPWS is organizing a series of lectures at the Queens Museum of Art featuring Nathalie Miebach, Isaac Gertman, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Jane D. Marsching.

(poster by Natalie Campbell & Isaac Gertman)

Weather Suits for Cities

This past Saturday, Nathalie Miebach spoke at the Queens Museum of Art as part of the SPWS guest lecture series, and in conjunction with Queens International 4 Public Programs.

Nathalie described how she takes weather data and translates it by hand into amazing woven sculptures. Data for specific periods of time and place are represented by color, material or type of placement—parameters defined ahead of time—and then the sculpture emerges in the weave from the dictates of the data, the end result not known at the outset.

Taking direct atmospheric observations into account through recent art residencies in very different weather environments—the tides of Cape Cod and the tornados of Nebraska—she explores the role visual aesthetics and personal experience play in understanding scientific information.

The weather data in her sculptural forms can also be interpreted as music, where a new sort of musical score can be read directly, in a spiral, from the weave. She is currently collaborating with musicians to interpret these sculptures-as-music, and played 2 examples of remarkably different interpretations of the same sculpture, one by horn, one by piano.

For more information on Nathalie’s work, and where to see it in person at her upcoming shows,  visit www.nathaliemiebach.com. Thanks much to Nathalie for sharing your work with us!

SP Weather Station in Queens International 4

Please join us!

SP Weather Station in:
QUEENS INTERNATIONAL 4: A Biennial Survey of Artists Living or Working in Queens January 24 – April 26, 2009

Opening reception: Saturday, January 24, 6pm-12am featuring live performances & screenings

Queens Museum of Art
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens

Featuring contributions from:

Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga of Hello Weather!
(www.eyebeam.org/hello-weather): Guest Weather Station on the QMA Rooftop

Daniel Larson: Weather Metabulator

Leah Beeferman, Natalie Campbell, Susan Goethel Campbell, Carrie Dashow, Mike Estabrook, Neil Freeman, Richard Garrison, Michael Geminder, Vandana Jain, Katarina Jerinic, Daniel Larson, Bridget Lewis, Lize Mogel, Heidi Neilson, Chris Petrone, Sarah Nicole Phillips, Jing Yu, Liz Zanis: SP Weather Reports, January 2008 – February 2009

As well as Guest Lecture Posters, a Cloud Identification Area, and MORE!

Upcoming SP Weather Station Guest Lectures at QI4:

Saturday, February 7, 2pm: Nathalie Miebach
Boston-based sculptor who translates weather data into woven sculptures, speaking about her evolving project “Weather Suits for Cities” and related work

Sunday, March 1, Time TBD:
In conjunction with MetLife First Sundays for Families at the QMA, SPWS presents 3 talks in the Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York:
Isaac Gertman video presentation: Weather Apocalypse NYC
Kenneth Goldsmith reads from his book, “The Weather”
SP Weather Station slideshow on Clouds of New York

Saturday, April 4, 2pm: Jane Marsching
Digital media artist speaking about her current project, “Arctic Listening Post,” and related work

Save the date, and some resources

Save the date: October 19
The next SPWS Guest Lecture will be Andrea Polli. Andrea is an artist, currently on the faculty in the MFA Program in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College and a resident at Eyebeam. In addition to numerous projects related to weather and climate, Andrea has installed weather stations on the roof at Eyebeam and at her home in Long Island City.

Also:
those in LIC should check out her Cloud Car test drive TOMORROW, September 19th, late afternoon, on the street at the corner of 21st St. and 43rd Ave.

Also:
Thanks to Andrea we also recently had a chance to meet a number of “local experts” at Eyebeam, several of whom have websites of interest to the SPWS community. Featured speakers were Tim Dye of AirNow and Victoria Vesna of the UCLA Art/Science Center. An assortment of artists, environmental activists, etc provided feedback on each others’ work and created a forum for research sharing, raising all kinds of questions to be addressed … in later blog posts.

(Tim Dye)
real time air quality data & visualizations courtesy of the US Government
http://www.airnow.gov/
www.airnowgateway.org

(Sarah Williams)
air quality measurements in Beijing during the Olympics
& visualizationswww.spatialinformationdesignlab.org
NY Times infographics

(Michael Heimbinder)
environmental health justice org. and mapping project in NYC
www.habitatmap.org

(Eve Mosher)public art projects
seedingthecity.org
www.highwaterline.org

Ian Cheney on “The City Dark”

The image above suggests the relevance of Ian Cheney’s recent Guest Lecture at SPWS.

SPWS Guest Lectures invite artists to present work that responds to environmental phenomena. Presenters to date have included LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) and Douglas Repetto, who collaborate as Cross Current Resonance Transducer on projects that record and transform weather data, and Stephanie Rothenberg, who gave an Introduction to Basic Divination.

Ian Cheney, our third Guest Lecturer, is the co-creator of the recent documentaries King Corn and The Greening of Southie. and, together with Curt Ellis operates as Wicked Delicate Films.

At SPWS, Ian gave a preview of his new project, The City Dark, which poses questions about a phenomenon that pervades contemporary life yet receives little popular attention: light pollution. Read more »

Stephanie Rothenberg invites you to divine… almost anything

On April 25th, Stephanie Rothenberg (www.pan-o-matic.com) introduced an audience at the SP Weather Station Base to the basics of divination, also known as dowsing.

The lecture and hands-on workshop gave attendees a point of entry into a a practice which continues to be widely practiced in numerous forms around the world.

The practice of divination, like the operation of a Personal Weather Station, is a way that individuals can take direct action in monitoring their immediate environment.

Despite a lack of scientific evidence for its efficacy, dowsing is likely the more widespread practice; while currently over 8,500 Personal Weather Stations upload data to Weather Underground from within the US and over 3,000 from other countries, one article estimates roughly 10,000 active dowsers in Germany alone.

Read more »

TODAY!

Stephanie Rothenberg: Introduction to Basic Divination

3 pm at SP Weather Station
http://tinyurl.com/3wbt6f

croquet and hanging out to follow
(watch out for the 7 train)

Travel alert!

If you are coming to the SP Weather Station Guest Lecture tomorrow, Sunday at 3pm, please note that the 7 train is not running between Manhattan and Queensboro Plaza! The best way to get to the lecture will be to take the G or E to court square and walk west on 46th avenue, almost to the water. this googlemap shows where the side entrance is for our building – we’ll have a sign up & the door will be open (but ignore the street address as there are no street numbers on the building): http://tinyurl.com/3wbt6f

Introduction to Basic Divination Guest Lecture 5/25/08

S.P. Weather Station Guest Lecture Series presents:

Introduction to Basic Divination
A workshop by Stephanie Rothenberg
Sunday May 25th, 3pm
(free and open to the public)

SP Weather Station, 46-01 5th Street, Long Island City, (go to side entrance on 46th Ave between 5th Street and Vernon Ave)

About the Workshop:

Divining, or dowsing as it is often times called, is the ultimate sustainable battery-free technology for getting the latest information. It is an ancient practice that was used by many cultures and continues to be used today. In the workshop, participants will be given an overview of basic divining and learn how to make their own divining rods from wire hangers and drinking straws. Stephanie has presented Divination Workshops at 16 Beaver Group, NYC and the Center for Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA.

About Stephanie Rothenberg:

Stephanie Rothenberg, a New York-based artist and educator, is the founder of Pan-O-matic (www.pan-o-matic.com), which brings together a diverse group of individuals interested in investigating our inter-personal relationship with new technologies. Since the rise of mass systemized culture in the early 20th century, the Western world has become increasingly dependent on technology to physically act for us and psychologically live for us. As our perception becomes increasingly subsumed by handheld devices telling us the where, when, what and how, Pan-O-matic strives to recalibrate our bodies and minds, attuning human perception to the mutable environment. Through the investigation of alternative tools and recombinant methodologies Pan-O-matic works at enabling us to regain our senses, or rather our own “sense-ability.”