Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson

"At any one time there are around 6,000 lightning storms happening across the world amounting to some 16 million storms each year."

... a delicious fact is culled from Pippa Irvine's review of Paterson's Street Light Storm installation on Deal Pier on FAD Fast Art News:

Inspired by such dizzying statistics Paterson set about translating this natural phenomena into a poetic and beautiful artwork on Deal Pier in Kent. Harnessing everyday technology, lightning signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africa are received by an antenna on the pier and projected as short bursts of light. As the pattern of lightning strikes changes, so the pier lights oscillate correspondingly, with a subtlety that contrasts with the power and drama of the storms they reflect.

To watch the pier by night is a genuinely magical experience with each flash anticipated with mounting tension. Every sporadic burst is accompanied by an appreciative emotional thrill and a sense of awe at the fact that somewhere out there the ominous rumbles of thunder and lightning are mounting. The work connects spectators to the vastness of the world beyond, collapsing the distance between the individual and remote meteorological events.

It's an interesting way of making art that represents scientific data in an open-ended way. Paterson turns Deal Pier a kind of lightning rod for the world; the romantic-era majesty of a lightning storm is reduced to data, but then remade as flickers of light.

The artwork was originally intended to run throughout January but has apparently gone down so well that it'll remain there until February 14, weekdays 5-10pm, weekends 5pm-8am.

www.katiepaterson.org/streetlightstorm/