cycle 24

In 1926 Russian biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky published "Physical Factors of the Historical Process", a paper describing correlations between solar cycles and historical events. High sunspot activity, Chizhevsky observed, was not only affecting electrical usage, radio traffic, epidemics, and grasshopper infestations, but exerted a direct influence on human behaviour as well, causing what he termed "increased mass excitability": periods of of insurrection, revolution, and war.

Cycle 24 superimposes 24-hour realtime feeds of solar data - temperature, density, speed, and magnetism of solar storms - on man-made metrics such as stock indexes and global Google search trends. When our human sensory apparatus limits us to perceive universal complexities as low-bandwidth abstractions, are we constructing mere circumstance as cause and effect, or is human history indeed shaped by distant cosmic events?

Work in progress. A first iteration of Cycle 24 was shown at bea.to, Lisbon, in November 2017.

Cycle 24. Video projection, generative audio, 2017. Real-time data feeds by NASA, NOAA, Google, and Alpha Vantage. // back to gl03.net