Nunavut Lights, an exploration in visualizing a large photographic archive using statistical and computational methods. The archive – collected and analyzed by our automated system – consists of a growing collection of time-lapsed images captured by a weather webcam in Kimmirut, Nunavut. On June 21st, 2010, the longest day of the year, we started capturing images from the Internet with the help of a webcam in Nunavut with a program specifically created, and data was collected four times every hour, twenty-four hours a day. As of October 2011, the archive contains about 30,000 images. This project is a database documentary, which represents an emerging practice in new media arts.
The webcam and website, hosted by KimmirutWeather.com, report the weather forecast in Kimmirut via still images. Generated by our custom software, the visualizations select images from the archive according to numerical attributes, including weather conditions, date and time, statistics from lighting and colour analysis, and recombine them as new visual compositions representing different facets of the archive. The Kimmirut scene remains a constant throughout, but it is transformed, re-imagined, and presented under a different light by each visualization. Nunavut Lights is a multi-format project that will include interactive work and short films proposing various experiences of reading the database.
This project will be presented during a solo exhibition at InterAccess in the Spring of 2012.
Meta Incognita by Pierre Tremblay
Combining multiple times within a single frame.
A time-lapse through the database showing some image statistics
A time-lapse of hand picked shots matching the subjective criteria of beauty