MOST BLUE SKIES, 2009, 2009
- Live Streaming, Multimedia

Together, Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway develop large-scale multi-media projects often based on collecting and re-processing live global data.

In the work Most Blue Skies, 2009 the artists attempt to answer the child’s question : “what is the bluest sky in the world?” using the most advanced scientific and technological resources available. Realtime satellite and atmospheric sensor data is processed by custom-built software, simulating the passage of light through the atmosphere and calculating the colour of the sky at millions of places on earth. Minute by minute, as the earth rotates and weather systems change, the location of the most blue sky is displayed and a square of beautiful blue light shows the most accurate possible reproduction of what it would be like to look up at that sky.

Most Blue Skies plays with the tension between the simplicity and romance of the image of the blue sky and the complex technology surrounding it. There is irony and humour in this painstakingly laborious pursuit of innocence, but also a sincere acceptance of the mutual
dependence between fragile optimism and hard science.

Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway have been working together since 1991. In their ambitious multimedia collaborations, they explore our relations to the networks, economies and technologies that surround us, and how our human experience is changed by the incorporation into these systems. 

Using advanced technologies, such as the visualisation of live global data streams, their complex multilayered installations explore a sense of global presence, time and human interdependence.