AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

A THOUSAND YEARS (+ 10) OF SKIES AND CLOUDS IN ART, 1000-2000

I seek fellow members of the Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective to collaborate with me on an interesting art project I call One Thousand Years of Clouds: a one-of-a-kind webpage, and later a print poster, that will be a 1,000-year matrix, covering the years 1000-to-1999, of sequential year-dated squares in which appear beautiful full-color images of sky and clouds from artworks created in those years -- details from paintings as well as (especially for the earlier years of the second millennium) illuminated manuscripts, stained-glass windows, and tapestries.

The brilliant UK-based Cloud Appreciation Society (www.CloudAppreciationSociety.org) and its founder-director Gavin Pretor-Pinney. I also envision the Thousand Years of Clouds and Skies as a potential theme art piece for the end-of-the-year Copenhagen Climate Conference that will determine the nature of our planet's atmosphere for the next thousand years and beyond, if a digital version can be completed and put up on the Web by about October.

A decade ago as the world approached the end of the second millennium, I was transfixed by a vision of a grand wall poster of 1,000 thematically-related images, one for each of the 1,000 years of the 1000s, presented all together, in chronological sequence.

This deep-time aggregation of recent and remote historic art posited 1,000 details and fragments, variously vividly and subtly hued, of pieces of sky from each of the 1,000 years of the 1000s -- blue sky and white clouds, sunrises and sunsets and bright mid-days, lifted from 1,000 tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, paintings (the preponderance of the piece's images), and color photographs (filling in some of the year-squares for the 20th century), all in chronological year-order from 1000 to 1999 -- a beautiful grid dominated by blues and whites, and pinks and salmons and lavenders.

And ten additional sky-years for these first ten years of the 2000s, 2000 to 2010, appended in the lower right corner after the final image from the 1000s, 1999.

The Thousand Years of Clouds and Skies Matrix web display could be filled in over a period of time in a distributed participatory online activity coordinated by AMP, perhaps in coordination with the Cloud Appreciation Society, sky-piece by sky-piece, year by year, ultimately filling in the 1,000 years and 100 decades of the second millennium. Each small image could be a link to the entire artwork or photograph of which it is a detail, and to information about the piece and its creator and context. The matrix could grow over time with the addition of details from additional works of art, even works originating in historic years already represented by images in the matrix. In cases where different images originate in the same year, the images could be digitally "stacked" atop one another.

Gavin of the CAS has suggested that "the 1,000 Clouds project should be as Web 3.0 as possible. In that we would want people to be able to do the uploading themselves to vote for the better image where there is more than one proposal for a particular year, etc."

Even with many of the squares blank for some time, this online display will be quite beautiful with colorful cloud and sky images scattered about here and there over its virtual surface, slowly filling themselves in as time passes -- just as quite a bit more time passed to create and manifest these many years, and their skies, in these artworks.

The entire paintings, photos, and artworks that cloud- and sky-art connoisseurs find could be uploaded -- with the sky detail later chosen, and cut out and placed into a second, "final product' matrix -- the Thousand Years of Clouds.

Seen whole, the Millennium Cloud Matrix will be a visual and textural gestalt of the passage of historic time itself -- a wonderful piece of soulful, colorful graphic art.

The Thousand Years of Clouds could later be developed as a print Thousand Years of Clouds Art Poster -- or series of posters, such as five 200-year posters -- for sale by the AMP and the Cloud Appreciation Society. Both the online and print creations would be products simultaneously beautiful and instructive.

A 100-image Skies of the 20th Century or 20th Century Cloud Matrix could do the same for the 100 years of the recently concluded 1900s. A similar approach could create a 100-thematic-image Cloud Matrix that represents the 100 decades of the second millennium. (There's more than one way to skin a century, or mold a millennium!)

What's needed is a relationship with one or more major museums of art, such as the Getty, or, better, a museum network. I've tried to open up a line of communication with the Getty Institute but haven't been successful, at least yet. I need to find such relationships, or information that could help lead to such a relationship, for this project. An art expert or two specializing in pre-20th-century art would be good too.

A Web and computer graphics programmer who can wrestle with the technical challenges of this project also is needed. I wish I were that person, but unfortunately I'm not.

A while back the Cloud Appreciation Society's Gavin wrote me that "there could be a bit in the society bank account to use, so long as we could see a way of sorting out the copyright issues so that we would eventually be able to get a poster printed. I think that you can get away without owning the copyright for something you reproduce, so long as you use less than a certain percentage of the image, and it is incoportated into a new and original work. If so, I reckon that it might be possible."

This potentially wonderful project has been stalled for a while, but I intend in this final half-year of the new millennium's first decade to get it back on track and, I hope, put into a satisfactory first phase of completion online by late this year. I hope to hear from anyone who is intrigued with, and able to play a role in realizing, this grand complex vision.

Gregory Wright
WRIGHT THINKING
Sherman Oaks, California
greg@newciv.org
(818) 784-0325