Nathalie Miebach: Art Made of Storms

TED Talk by Artist Nathalie Miebach takes weather data from storms and turns it into complex sculptures that embody the forces of nature and time. The sculptures then become a musical score for a string quartet to play.

The musical score played was made up of interactions of barometric pressure, wind and temperature readings that were recorded from Hurricane Noel in 2007.

Every single bead and every single coloured band represents a weather element that can be read as a musical note.

From the beginning, Nathalie extracts information from a specific environment using low tech data collecting devices and compares her findings with information on the internet. So she now has historical and real data, which she then compiles on separate clipboards and then she begins her translation process.

What Nathalie loves about her work is that it challenges assumptions of visual vocabulary and where it belongs in the world of art versus science. 

The sculpture, depending on where it’s placed could be a sculpture, a three-dimensional visualisation of data or a musical score, and that’s what she likes is that it challenges the viewer as to what visual language is a part of science versus art versus music.

Reflection

The final TED talk by Natalie Miebach was an interesting use of data sets and how she turned these data sets into beautiful pieces of art. I learnt that as a designer there is a lot of uses for data and turning data into art sculptures is very inspiring and exciting.