Watching for the Weather: Travess Smalley’s Fell-Cloud

On 16 september, we’ll launch Fell-Cloud, the fourth collection of NFTs based on the [aside] protocol in collaboration with Travess Smalley. This release will have the following feature: all purchased NFTs will be locked at mint time and will be unlocked when fog appears at the Gunnerkeld stone circle - a prehistoric megalith site dating from the Bronze Age - located in Cumbria, in northwest England, between 2pm and 3pm CET.

Introduction

Before delving into the details of this drop lets recall that [aside] is a protocol that enables the immobilization of any NFT on the Ethereum blockchain and conditions its release to external phenomena, whether natural (weather, earthquake, storm), astral (solar eruption, planetary transit), economic (inflation, deflation), financial (stock market), demographic, or social. Once locked, these NFTs remain non-transferable for a dedicated period of time or until a specific real-world event happens, therefore restricting the tradability of the artwork by tying its commercial becoming to the outside world.

Generative fog

Fell-Cloud is a series of 36 photographs rendered in software. Each photograph was taken on the train from London to Glasgow over a few minute period 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 the real-world weather data, collected from a local weather station, for the 12 years since the photographs’ capture until the release of the live artwork.

The Sun Elevation and Temperature values act as a seed into pseudorandom number generation. This then determines the changes in color over the cycle. The Visibility determines the presence of fog, and the Wind Speed is proportional to the motion of the fog. Together, these ensure each day is unique while still bound by reality.

Travess Smalley Statement

A fell-cloud, a rowk, mist-hlip, ge-nip, a carry, or daggy— all English words, long out of use, that describe clouds, mists, and fogs. I’m drawn to these words; they feel semi-familiar, like a slip of the tongue, like a spell, or a secret half-known language that can describe the indescribable.

My attraction to these lost bits of language traces back to my own surname, Smalley, derived from the Old English Smæl-lēah, meaning a narrow woodland clearing. Smalley, also a village in Derbyshire, England, which I’ve never visited.

Capturing the Lake District's impression on that foggy November afternoon was challenging.

In the Fall of 2012 I took a round trip train from Glasgow to London. On both train rides I was struck by a dreamlike beauty and hallucinatory gray wildness of the Lake District. Through the wispy veil of misty hills and fog Northern England felt otherworldly, partially rendered, and liminal. Like some ethereal romanticist painting from the 18th century, or the opening cutscene from some early 3D game.

On the train ride back to Glasgow I placed my phone to the window and tried to photograph vague forms appearing out of the mist. Bits of landscape, sun streaks, houses in the distance, sheep. That these pictures were all taken so close to the megalithic site of Gunnerkeld Stone Circle only heightened their mystical, elusive, unknowable, and otherworldly characteristics.

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.

Fog: Appearing out of the fog. The world rendering out of fog. Fog of war. The distance fog in computer generated 3D worlds, television static, neutral grays, perlin noise and randomness that appears like fog. Entropy returning to some neutral gray state.

The work is continuous, meant to run for long periods of time on a screen, projection, or secondary monitor. Days pass at regular intervals. The system on display in Fell-Cloud uses historical weather data, sun elevation and temperature to construct new chromatically vibrant color palettes that distort the photographs' gamma values to change the appearance of the landscape. The system incorporates a procedural fog on days where there was less visibility. These values are randomized based on this historic weather data so that viewers around the world will have the same visual experience at the same time.

Gunnerkeld stone circle

All pictures taken by Travess on the 05 November 2012, which serve as the source for these generative artworks, were captured within a few minutes, between 2pm and 3pm CET in the immediate vicinity of the Gunnerkeld stone circle during a foggy day.

The Gunnerkeld stone circle is a prehistoric site dating back to the Bronze Age. It consists of two circles. The first, measuring approximately 30 meters north-south and 24 meters east-west, is made up of 19 large granite stones, three of which are upright and just over 1 meter tall. The second, an inner circle measuring about 18 meters north-south by 16 meters east-west, consists of 31 granite stones. This inner circle forms the kerb of an earth and stone cairn up to 1 meter high, which outlines the outer edge of the site.

Stone circles like Gunnerkeld remain true archaeological mysteries, sparking fascination and intrigue because historians know relatively little about them. Researchers suggest that these circles may have served multiple purposes over the ages, including religious ceremonies, community gatherings, and burial sites.

The unlock process

The mechanism for releasing the NFTs is extremely simple to understand: If fog appear at the Gunnerkeld stone circle -whose GPS coordinates are: 54.5546721,-2.6650169, between 2pm and 3pm CET all the artworks will be unlock. Meaning they can be sold, trade or burn.

For this, we connected the [aside] protocol to the OpenWeather API. Every day from 3 pm to 4 pm, a request will be sent to the OpenWeather API to check if fog is present in the area of the Gunnerkeld stone circle. If the API returns the code 741 indicating the presence of fog at the time of the call, a transaction will be automatically executed to trigger the [aside] smart contract and unlock all NFTs. That’s it!

The use of Chainlink Functions

If all of this seems so simple, it's because [aside] relies on Chainlink Functions.

Chainlink Functions offers a a serverless developer platform for fetching data from any API and running custom compute using Chainlink’s highly secure and reliable network. . This allows us to seamlessly connect our [aside] smart contract to any API, leveraging Chainlink’s Decentralized Oracle Network (DON) without the need to manage the intricacies of building a custom connectivity solution.

Each [aside] ERC721 token inherits Chainlink's FunctionsClient contract, enabling us to make calls to the decentralized oracle network (DON) to retrieve data from the OpenWeather API.

Each time a batch of tokens is requested to be unlocked, our smart contract calls the Chainlink Functions router, requesting the execution of a specific JavaScript code to retrieve OpenWeather data. This contract then forwards our request to the DON, where each node executes the requested JavaScript, the DON reaches consensus using OCR, and relays the result to our [aside] smart contract.

If the data returned matches the weather condition required to unlock all artworks then they are unlocked forever. Otherwise, the function reverts and nothing happens.

We can picture this process like this:

Conclusion

Fog has long fascinated artists across all forms of art, from cinema (think of Hitchcock or Carpenter) to painting (like Caspar David Friedrich or Claude Monet), to video games (countless examples), and to contemporary art (such as Olafur Eliasson).

With Fell-Cloud, Travess Smalley brings fog into the realms of generative and protocol art, using it in two 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.

In his work The Uncontrollability of the World, sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa reminds us that snow is the ultimate form of what he calls "the unavailable," meaning an aspect of reality that escapes human control and cannot be fully integrated or mastered by modern society.

"Falling snow is perhaps the purest manifestation of uncontrollability. We cannot manufacture it, force it, or even confidently predict it, at least not very far in advance."

Fog belongs to the same category as snow; it reveals a dimension of reality that highlights our limitations in the face of nature and events that cannot be fully reduced to human processes. While we cannot summon or force the presence of fog, we hope that through this series, we have demonstrated that it is still possible to embrace its unpredictable nature through a protocol. This, in turn, suggests the possibility of imagining a world where nature takes precedence over the economy. Because while we cannot manufacture or control snow or fog, we can still experiment with the idea of creating a different economy—one where humanity has chosen to place nature as sovereign over its economic world.