Art in the Weather World: An Artists collaboration with Climate Change Science: Art from the Ocean Tropos 1, 2 and 3

Now that my PhD has been converted to a more manageable MPhil (same academic rigour but fewer words required in the thesis) I have returned to the Atlantic field work from late 2016 on board the RV Polarstern to complete some academic 'evidence' to which I refer in the discussion chapter. Having researched the idea that art creates knowledge I decided that, at least in terms of the academic discipline of cultural geography, it does no such thing. Despite the much argued claims of university fine art academics and others to the contrary, within the definition of knowledge understood by geographers and philosophers (by philosopher Graham Harman recently for example) there was no way I could claim to be creating new knowledge and so the original plan of submitting a thesis for consideration as a PhD was not logically possible within the system of academic assessment in geography. Harman's claim for art is one principally of metaphor, which he sees as vital in our grasp of reality but which does not fall within the sphere of knowledge as normally understood say in science or social science. Then again Harman does not see philosophy or economics as capable of generating knowledge either, if knowledge is understood as verified true belief.

Back to the art! I wanted to create a studio response to one of the scientific projects I encountered on the voyage from Germany to Cape Town at the end of 2016. Because my daily sketchbook work and the portable Yi4k action camera I installed on the side of the ship (which kindly took 34 000 photos for me) I was interested in the work of a Leipzig team of atmospheric physicists who similarly captured a representation of the whole voyage with their sophisticated laser backscatter equipment. Their project, named TROPOS (which studies the impact of aerosols on atmospheric dynamics at the Leipzig Institute for Tropspheric Research, an independent scientific institute: https://www.tropos.de/en/research/atmospheric-aerosols/process-studies-on-small-spatial-and-temporal-scales/aerosol-radiation-interaction/impact-of-aerosols-on-atmospheric-dynamics) involved sending a pulsed laser up into the sky above the ship and measuring the back scatter of light from water droplets, ice particles, desert dust and smoke. These were plotted as the ship went a long to produce some very colourful graphic representations of the troposphere, like a slice through the atmosphere spread over 4 weeks. Here's what it looked like glued onto a canvas in 6 rows of 4 days.

Each daily image represents backscatter from sea level to 8km above the ship filtered at a particular frequency, in this case 532 nanometres. My simple idea was glue the raw data onto canvas and paint a landscape over it based on my field sketches. It's a juxtaposition of objective machine generated information with a subjective, human made interpretation of an actual experience of the weather. Here's how it turned out after a few iterations of applying paint and rubbing it away again then repainting, over and over until I was happy (or otherwise).

Tropos1, acrylic on laser print on paper on canvas

Most of the data has disappeared but enough remains to lend a strange, slightly architectural sense of space to the picture. Anyone encountering the original painting would see that 24 pieces of paper have been glued on and painted over and they would also see the pattern of the data underneath the paint, but its meaning would not be obvious. In fact I would hope that viewers might find it attractive in a "Romantic sunset" kind of way, but odd in a "what are those funny barcode lines?" kind of way.

The sketch on which it is based, was of a particularly memorable sunset near the Canary Islands and which clearly showed the pattern of a big Atlantic swell which was following us from a low pressure system hundreds of miles away to the north of us. When I look at the drawing I can feel the ship surging with the swell which was overtaking us. I can also hear the low thrum of the diesel engine exhaust and feel the warm tropical breeze generated by the movement of the ship.

When I sent a photo of the painting to the scientists they recalled exactly which sunset this was based on, even though I had given them no information about the date of the sketch nor the sketch itself (which is a mirror image of the painting). I was impressed! Other comments stimulated me to start a bigger canvas, 1.5m wide. This is how it looked on day one. With the laser printed data glued on the canvas goes drum-tight and sounds a bit like an Irish bodhran. Maybe one day someone will play my paintings in a folk band!

In this painting, Tropos 3, used just two and half days of data from our passage down the English Channel in early November when a series of fronts followed us west. You can see two the fronts slanting down as white areas in the data. This time I selecting back scatter data filtered to a longer wavelength (1064 nm) mainly because I liked the darker colours and especially because of the intense blue. I mirrored the original data so that the thin white horizontal join line could represent the horizon. To be precise this white line is a 2mm gap showing canvas between the upper plot and its reflected image. I then painted over the data in the usual way with acrylic paint, scrappers, shapers, water spray, wet cloth, anything that could make a mark. Here's the result so far which may not be finished yet.

Tropos 3, acrylic on laser print on paper on canvas

And here's the sketch it is loosely based on. Again the sketch reminds me of the feeling of being at sea with little rain showers on the horizon, at least two distinct layers of cloud and a patch of blue sky in the upper middle.

My action camera had not been fully set up on Nov 14th so I have no digital photographs of the same view from the port side that correspond to the time of the sketch. I have a photo from earlier in the day taken from my cabin window also on the port side. In it you can see the coaster which is slowly overtaking us and which appears in the sketch on the right hand side.