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Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson.

At any one time there are around 6,000 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 Katie Paterson's Streetlight Storm. 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. She uses 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 the viewer on Deal Pier and remote meteorological events around the globe. Lightning signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africa are received by an antenna on the pier and translated into light pulses. 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. The artist says, "I am interested in the way the ordinary and the otherworldly intersect, and much of my work uses...

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