How did this idea come about?
As artists, we already dialog with elements of nature. A new opportunity to creatively use nature-based data became the perfect opportunity to honor Earth Day 2022. Paul Godwin, Elena DeLacy and myself got together with Zack Dowell at the Innovation Center, Folsom Lake College, to talk about data, media, music, and sound.
I started developing a piece I call "Harbingers". Harbingers are subtle indicators of change in the climate. I was looking for data that express subtle variations, those we might ordinarily miss, as raw material. To try to connect the artistic senses to the hard sciences.
Searching for local historical climate data, it was surprising to learn that a key impetus for weather observations, especially in the local Sacramento area, came from medical experts looking for connections between weather data and the transmission of disease.
Specifically, in the 1850s, Dr. Frederick Winslow Hatch was a member of the local branch of the American Medical Association, involved with the Sacramento Board of Health. He studied weather, and in 1855, published “On the Climate of the Valley of the Sacramento, California” in the New York Journal of Medicine. That forty-one page climatology paper was based on his own observations of the seasons, and what he perceived to be relationships between climate and diseases.
“We have devoted thus much to the subject of the daily variation in temperature to which we are exposed, and its influence upon the health, from a conviction that to this single cause many of the diseases met with in this valley are to be attributed in its direct or secondary relation."
Hatch recorded his observations four times a day, at sunrise, noon, sunset, and 10 p.m., including the average temperatures and the extremes, barometric readings, hygrometer’s maximum and minimum dew point and moisture in the air, wind direction and force; and the weather--cloudy, precipitation, days with fog, and the color of the sky. He wrote that even when the sky was cloudless, there was often a vapory condition that obscured the natural sky color.
And, with this one poetic observation from August 1855, the idea for the first movement Harbingers, Color of the Sky, was born.
-by Ameera Godwin, Video Artist/Artistic Director, Myrtle Tree Arts, for Earth Dayta
LINKS TO MORE DETAILS AND RESERVATIONS:
Make a reservation: https://app.donorview.com/3PM6o
$10/car
Location:
941 Cold Springs Rd.
Placerville, CA 95667 + Google Map
Insta: @myrtletreearts
Email: myrtletreearts@gmail.com
Fascinating .. I d love to hear more about this. And see where it goes.
ReplyDelete