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What's the weather like in CapLan?
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:: Credits ::
- Bernard Gortais (scenography, sonorous and plastic design)
- Guillaume Hutzler (technical design and programming)
- Didier Lechenne (plastic design)
- Galerie Natkin-Berta (production)
:: Exhibitions ::
- 1993 : Galerie Natkin-Berta, Paris (France)
- 1994 : Fête de la science, Institut aérotechnique de St-Cyr (France)
- 1994 : Ars Electronica, Linz (Autriche)
- 1994 : Les Assises du Métafort d'Aubervilliers (France)
- 1994 : Faust, Art & science exhibition, Toulouse (France), in partnership with Météo France
- 1994 : Café-livre Le CapLan & Co., Poul Rodou (France)
:: Presentation ::
This artistic project, produced by the Natkin-Berta gallery in 1993, is the first one in a series that initiated my work and reflexion on infinite and situated generative artworks.
This work has been developped after a long stay of artist Bernard Gortais in Montréal (Canada), during which he programmed 2D-tilings using the Logo language. Influenced by P. Stevens, he has generated automatically numeric pictures. However, somewhat frustrated by the result, he tried to go further.
The artistic project
In this work, the aim is to have an abstract picture evolve by interfacing graphical elements with a set of meteorological, astronomic and marine variables, so as to suggest, in real-time, the weather ambience of a particular place (CapLan is a reference to the CapLan & Co café-bookshop located on the north coast of Brittany, between Lannion and Morlaix).
Plastic design
The picture is the reproduction of an abstract painting by B. Gortais, which has been decomposed into a number of independant graphical elements. Each of these elements is then given a specific behavior, coupled with chosen variables, so as to continuously change their position, color, shape, depending on time and weather. Some ponctual animations can also be featured periodically or stochastically, for example to evoke the presence of wind, or at particular moments such as sunrise.
Technical design and programming
The project has been developped using Macromedia Director 3.1., using the associated Lingo language for the description of the behavior of the graphical elements and the interactivity. In addition, some external functions have been written in C to enable the use of scientific operators (sin, cos, etc.) and to obtain fluid animations.