Invalid Data
Grayson Cooke
This event has concluded
Dates:
Entry Fee:
Free
Exhibition Event:
Official Opening
14/05/2020 6:00 pm
Grayson Cooke. Critical engagement with the cloud-filtering algorithms employed by Geoscience Australia’s “Digital Earth Australia” (DEA) satellite-imaging platform.
The images in this exhibition derive from a critical engagement with the cloud-filtering algorithms employed by Geoscience Australia’s “Digital Earth Australia” (DEA) satellite-imaging platform. For the past 40 years, NASA Landsat satellites have been circling the Earth, capturing high-resolution multi-spectral images of the surface of the planet from 700km into space.
Scientists at DEA use this satellite data to track environmental change over time, and they employ complex algorithms to filter clouds from the data to obtain a clear picture of the Earth. The result of this filtering is a vast archive of “invalid data” – a 40-year record of the incredible cloud formations that daily spread across the continent.
Inverting normal scientific process, the images in this series are produced using this invalid data, showing the clouds, cloud shadow and fragments of gauzy land that are deemed unusable for scientific earth observation. Simultaneously algorithmic, computational and photographic, these images are rendered using Near-Infrared and Shortwave Infrared light, enabling a dramatic colour space that separates cloud layers and types and foregrounds atmospheric textures and phenomena invisible to the human eye.
Born in New Zealand and based in Australia, Grayson Cooke is an interdisciplinary scholar and media artist, Associate Professor of Media in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. Grayson has presented media art and live audio-visual performance works in Australia and internationally, and he has exhibited and performed in major international festivals such as the Japan Media Arts Festival, the WRO Media Art Biennale, the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York, VIDEOFORMES in France and the Currents New Media festival in Santa Fe. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Concordia University in Montreal.
List your exhibition or photography event on our site to reach out to the Australian photographic community.
