This summer, Leah Bertrand, a PhD candidate in CU Boulder’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department, showcased their artwork, an interactive audiovisual art installation, at a community art collective in Lafayette, Colorado. The piece, “Vapor Mirror Feedback,” uses 15 years of cloud data from NOAA’s GOES geostationary satellites and was a collaboration with Denver-based artist Ricky Covell. The work was on display for two months as part of the RECESS Electronic Arts exhibit. According to the website, “RECESS brings together artists exploring media and their entanglements – with ‘nature’, culture and its wars, with itself, with the more/other than human.” 

Bertrand, a PhD student in CIRES Fellow Jen Kay’s group, researches Arctic clouds and their role in a changing climate. Their research focuses on interactions between clouds and large-scale climate, especially in the Arctic. They use observations and radiative transfer models to analyze how clouds modulate atmospheric energy flows, placing special emphasis on the power of combined radar and lidar. Bertrand is also interested in technology as a shared medium for translating climate change research into music.

Explain your art installation — how does it incorporate images from the GOES satellite? 

The piece is an interactive video and an audio synthesizer that's being fed by cloud animations from the GOES geostationary satellites maintained by NOAA. These are weather satellites that are always watching our world, and especially the Eastern and Western U.S. We took these high-resolution in space and time animations to make these really beautiful movies that are fun to look at.

How is audio exhibited in the piece?

The visual input from clouds is paired with an audio synthesizer I created. I wanted to make something that was interactive, but not distracting. Each of the knobs on the controller that the viewer twists to experience the piece, all of those control a different aspect of the sound — the harmony or the register (like how high or low pitched it is), the timbre (or tone quality), and how constant or dissonant it is. So the audio adjusts accordingly as the user turns all of these knobs and quickly changes the video. The response audio lags, eventually catching up with the changes to the video. The recordings in the piece are animations of clouds transforming in real time, and clouds and colors swirl on the screen. 

How can we interpret the clouds through the visual aspect of the piece? 

You can see clouds passing by on the screen. The clouds are colder than the surface, so they emit less radiation. Depending on which frequency of light the video comes from, that determines whether or not you see things like a sunrise or a sunset, or a coastline, or a hurricane, or a storm. 

What inspired the idea? 

Ricky has done plenty of video art before, and I love talking to them about things that I am excited about, such as clouds. One day, they were browsing some of these satellite images of clouds and sent them to me. I just got so excited, and was like, we have to do something with this. 

Explain the title: Vapor Mirror Feedback

The animations are water vapor; you know which parts are light and dark, are in large part determined by how wet the atmosphere is, and at what height that moisture is. Like with hurricanes, you can see that they're dark blobs on the screen because they're all filled with moisture. The feedback piece is how water vapor and clouds respond to greenhouse gas emissions, which has a huge feedback effect on how much the planet warms. The mirror part is how audiences create their own feedback loop with the piece, exploring and changing the controls in response to what they see and hear. As an individual, I wanted to reflect on the complexity of how moisture moves around in the Earth's atmosphere, and share with audiences the challenge of trying to figure out what every place in the world is doing all the time and what the aggregate effect on the overall energy of the planet is. 

What do you hope people experience as they interact with the piece? 

What I hope people experience is that Earth science and observational satellite programs aren't just a scientific asset to the world, but they're also an aesthetic asset — that there's this compelling or beautiful way of looking at the world that we only have because we do the science. This kind of work is important to me because creativity is also a part of science, and so engaging in a subjective creative way with Earth's atmosphere and earth science, to me, just feels like another side of the same coin.