Janine Randerson
Janine Randeson, albedo of clouds
The albedo of clouds by Janine Randerson concerns sunlight in a darkened room. It joins a magnificent history of art that takes sunlight, in real time or delayed, and brings it indoors. Such were the great stained glass windows of the Gothic cathedrals; such is Thompson and Craighead’s Light from Tomorrow.
Albedo is the proportion of visible light which things reflect. Even on a dark day, sunlight makes it through the clouds down to us on the surface, but on a plane, you can see how much of the sunshine is converted into earthshine and bounced up and away into the teeming emptiness of space.
This is a work concerned with the light that the earth gives back. Huge aggregations of water droplets, clouds scatter light – again, on a plane, or sometimes on high mountains above the cloudline, a rainbow-hued halo around a cast shadow, your own or your aircraft’s, shows how richly a cloud plays with the light the sun gives it. Just so the perspex domes play with light.
In the two screens suspended in the half-lit gallery are images of clouds, one seen from below as we would normally see them. We look up to see the real and the recorded clouds. But now we also look up to see what clouds look like if we could look down on them, from a great height, from geostationary orbit. There are two optics, and the distance between them is not very great.
One is the image of transmitted light, light that makes it through. The other is of reflected light, light we will never see on the surface of our suffering planet. Light sent to communicate to the outer galaxy, and to the galaxies beyond, that we too once shone. It is our response to the vast generosity of the sun. Looking up from below into clouds we see that generosity: we are rarely aware of what we give back in return. Such is the nature of generosity.
The perspex clouds hanging in the gallery’s air are manufactured from oil. The whole system of drives and casings [in computer-driven art] are organised from industrial chemistry and rare earths, from oil drilling and mines. They are physically implicated in climate change, which is the unhidden meaning of any meteorological theme in the early twenty-first century. These materials are integral with ancient sunlight and the changing albedo. As the last oil flows, we still do not know all of its potential. Better make an artwork out of oil and earths than to burn them or scatter them in the oceans. This is the nature of honesty.
Reflection is how we must respond to the untold generosity of the sun which produced the forests whose dying made us our irreplacable chemical heritage. Saddam Hussein burnt the oilfields in order to cut out the middleman. The albedo of clouds reinscribes the middle, mediation. Be reflected in these transmissions. Assume your role in the solar cycle.
Text by Sean Cubitt
Sean Cubitt is Director of the Program in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor of the University of Dundee. His publications include Timeshift: On Video Culture, Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture, Digital Aesthetics, Simulation and Social Theory, The Cinema Effect and EcoMedia. He is the series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His current research is on public screens and the transformation of public space; and on genealogies of digital light.
Details of Work
Janine Randerson
albedo of clouds
2008
2 x round screens 840 diameter each
perspex, computers, projectors, pinhole cameras
Audio design: Jason Johnston
Visible Image Satellite Images: Australian Bureau of Meteorology
Artist Biography
Janine Randerson b. 1974, Auckland, New Zealand. Currently resides Melbourne, Australia. Has a Master of Fine Arts, RMIT University, Melbourne (2001). Exhibitions include Anemocinegraph in ‘The Trouble with the Weather’, UTS gallery, Sydney, Australia (2007); Remote Senses; Storms nearby, in ‘Ecomatics and Geomatics’, III International Exhibition of Art and Science, Shanghai, China (2007); Rorschach Clouds, ISEA: Remote Symposium, San Jose, USA (2006); Lure of the Islands, in ‘The Greenhouse’, Open Art Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany (2004); Sky Views, DVD projection, Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne, Australia (2001). Awards and residencies include Australian Postgraduate Association scholarship (APA), University of Melbourne (2007); Digital Art Residency, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand (2006); Corban Art Estate, Site Specific installation Award, Auckland (2005); Fellowship with Human Interface Technology laboratory, Christchurch (2005); Panasonic Independent Video Award, Auckland, New Zealand (1996). Collections include Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, U.K; The National Film Archive, Wellington, NZ; MIC Archive, Auckland NZ.
Randerson is a New Zealand artist who employs a range of time-based media, including 16mm film, digital audio and video and computer programmed interaction design. Her art practice includes both site-specific work and single channel video. A recurrent theme in her work is the play with systems of observation; from the microcosmic imagery to the remote view of satellite imaging. In 2006 she collaborated with meteorologists as the digital artist in residence at the University of Waikato. Currently she is on the guest editorial panel of a special issue of MIT’s Leonardo Journal. Janine is a board member of ADA (Aotearoa Digital Arts network), and a member of Synapse, the art-science collaboration network in Australia. In 2008, as a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, she is researching historical observation practices at the Melbourne Museum and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.