Alessandra 7351 is a quadraphonic sound performance based on the data collected by one of the four oldest Italian Automatic Weather Station (AWS), Alessandra, that is located at Cape King along the coast of Victoria Land, a region of Antarctica.
The performance relies on three components:
– The software, a Pure Data patch, is the “instrument.”
– The AWS data (time, the atmospheric pressure, the temperature, the relative humidity, the wind speed and direction, and the solar radiation) is the “score” to be read and interpreted by the software.
– The performer, is disrupting this interpretation by being able to pause, rewind and change the tempo of the reading of the score, as well as controlling the clock speed of one of the sound generators.
The piece was originally commissioned in 2007 by Mongrel and the Mediashed as part of the Antarctic Data Jam project. It was subsequently released on the CD compilation of the same name and on the Desetxea label.
source code: https://gitorious.org/0xa/alessandra7351
FLAC, mp3 and ogg downloads from one of the live sets can be found on archive.org
Photos from the Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide (PNRA).