Rhizome Radar

by Peter Nowicki
(Charlestown, MA USA)

This is good technology but it is expensive to build and maintain, and if it goes down then the service goes down.

Better to scale down the technology and scale up the number of components (participants). This is similar in concept to what flickr did to online images--by having the masses contribute in small amounts, you end up with the same net result, but with more reliability and flexibility in the system as a whole.

Here's how it would work:

Pay participants around the area a small fee to install a microwave camera on their roof. This mini-camera will have built-in GPS and take pictures every X minutes. It will be hooked up to the participants' internet connection through their computer (which they should leave on) and feed the data back to the weather station, which will create a composite picture of the area's weather in real time by pasting together thousands of small images and stitching them together based on their geogrpahic location (from the GPS).

Barry's Response - What is Rhizome, Peter? It is an organization that aims to integrate art and technology while providing a medium to communicate new ideas with each other. They also claim to promote and expose artistic work and to encourage participants to stretch limits and innovate. This covers many of the fundamental purposes of art anyway, but it is probably a good idea to involve many artists and perspectives in the creation of new extensive works.

Can weather observations be pooled to create a massive work of art? Why not?



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