Katie Paterson

21st December 2009 - 14 February 2010, weekdays 5-9pm, weekends 5pm-11pm

Deal Pier, East Kent, England, CT14

*Last night of viewing February 13th 5pm-8am*

At any one time there are around 6000 lightning storms happening across the world, amounting to some 16 million storms each year. Such dizzying statistics are useful to hold in mind while experiencing Streetlight Storm, a new artwork by Katie Paterson. For one month on Deal Pier in Kent, during the hours of darkness, the pier lamps will flicker in time with lightning strikes happening live in different parts of the world.

Katie Paterson creates poetic artworks exploring landscape, space and time, using technology to bring together the commonplace and the cosmic. Streetlight Storm deftly harnesses everyday technology to connect with vast natural phenomena, collapsing the distance between us and remote meteorological events. Lightning signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africaare received by an antenna on the pier and translated into 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.

(Text taken from website: http://www.katiepaterson.org/streetlightstorm/info.html)