FELL-CLOUD #16

Fell-Cloud is a series of 36 photographs rendered in software. Each photograph was taken on the train from London to Glasgow near the Gunnerkeld stone circle.

While many aspects of Fell-Cloud are randomly generated, everything is ultimately deterministic and synchronized. All viewers experience the same transitions, diurnal cycle, fog, and color shifts. This is achieved by using real-world weather data, collected from a local weather station, over a 12-year period since the photographs’ capture until the release of the live artwork.

In 2012, during a train journey through Northern England, Smalley was captivated by the misty, dreamlike landscape of the Lake District which appeared like a romanticist painting or the opening cutscene from an early video game. Attempting to capture this ethereal beauty, Smalley photographed the landscape from the train window near the ancient megalithic site of Gunnerkeld Stone Circle. The photos took on a mystical, otherworldly, unknowable quality.

In Fell-Cloud, I’m returning to these phone photographs and emphasizing the sense of possibility and world rendering that fogs and mists can elicit. Both through the mists I captured with my phone, and through fog that is procedurally generated. - Travess Smalley

With Fell-Cloud, Travess Smalley brings fog into the realms of generative and protocol art, using it in innovative ways, first, as a medium for creation and generative duplication through the creation of a generative fog based on a 12-year meteorological database, and second, as meteorological data that triggers the release of his works.

Fell-Cloud unites fog as both the subject and object of creation, making the presence of fog in a precise area a necessary condition for the economic life of the works to begin.