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For A Ship Adrift, I installed a weather station on top of the South Bank Centre, as part of Artangel’s A Room For London. Around the same time—the first week of January—I also installed a video camera. One of the outcomes of this is now online: A Ship Aground.

The camera takes a picture every 15-30 minutes, from the prow of the Roi de Belges, overlooking the river and the embankment. A Ship Aground stitches these pictures into slices based on time: the image above consists of 24 hours of observations—88 images from midnight to midnight—on March 15th. The images are large and loaded live in the browser, which may take a while, and it’s an effect I like for its depiction of your local network weather. These pixels have been pulled from the river, uploaded to an Amazon data shed in Ireland, and are now raining back down wherever you are.

At the moment, you can generate slicelogs of up to 24 hours from any date or time the camera has been operating. (Owing to the peculiar network weather on the South Bank, there are a few gaps in the record, but not many.) Later, I hope to generate different models, such as a slice for every midday over the year, and so on.

You can link directly to particular slicelogs; for example, the image above is generated by http://shipadrift.com/aground/#3,15,0,24. Here’s June 1st, from 10am to 6pm:

And if you need a reminder of how grim the Jubilee was…

I’ve been playing with these slice images for a while. Here’s “100 summers” from Flickr (100 images tagged “summer”). They were originally inspired by this image of the Sutro tower at sunset by Patrick Gibson (here’s another take, by hugovk). Robot André Breton played a part, as did lovely things like NSKYC.

Thanks to Artangel for commissioning and continuing to support the project.