Trapped in the Clouds, Pondering the Night features Robert Blatt (composer and sound artist) and Jon Paden (MFA in Visual Arts ’17). This participative, multimedia work merges computer vision with dynamic audio-visual space to create a self-reflexive, interconnected and temporal sound-vision environment. The work monitors the sky with an ultra-high-definition 4K camera, looking for shifts in the chaos of the clouds and analyzing patterns and changes of hue over the course of the day. The 4K stream can be processed via novel computer-vision algorithmic approaches, using rates of change and the gridded relationship of pixel values within the captured image. This approach translates the outdoor skyscape into an indoor soundscape, and that soundscape shifts as day transitions into night.

The monitored sky is displayed on the Vroom display wall in the Calit2 Theater. Changing sections of the video stream are displayed in conjunction with the soundscape of filtered noise, whose density of band-pass filters, spatial diffusion and filter parameters are altered based on the monitored results of the video display. Trapped in the Clouds… translates the exterior skyspace into a diffuse and reflected audio-visual image. “The image is akin to a reflection pond,” says artist Jon Paden. “Above this pond, visitors have the ability to instrument themselves with electronically modified fishing poles installed at the periphery of the space.” The poles each carry a small microphone, camera, multi-processing sensor and an LED light that are combined and deployed at the end of each ‘fishing line” where the hook should be.