Joe Mckay is a Canadian artist. His works address the idea of digital culture and he is currently an assistant professor of New Media. The project Sunset Solitaire is an interactive exercise where Mckay tries to approximate the color of a sunset using a computer program that works with gradients of blue, yellow and red. He projects the image onto a wall (in this case, a garage) and then changes the gradients to match those of the sunset as the sunset progresses. He invites an audience to watch his "symphony" and so there is an element of public display involved.
Mckay's interaction with nature is really interesting. He is using digital technology to approximate a natural event--in particular, a very beautiful and artistic event. He is "painting" the sky in the sense that he is trying to copy its colors and blending in a digital manner and reproducing it in a way that, alongside the natural subject, blends in and becomes a part of the real thing. By simulating nature, Mckay is provactively saying that the beauty of nature, something long-established to be one of its biggest contributions to humanity, can be replicated by digital means. Revealing this, one might wonder why nature is necessary or why it should be preserved if it can so easily be replaced by a computer-generated image.
I think it would be a slightly better final product if the image was projected on a flatter surface than a garage door since this takes away from the blend of digital and natural. However, it also reminds us that one image is digital which can be a good thing for the artist so the viewer is never fully able to join digital and natural and is always aware of the separation between the two. In any case, I think this is a very interesting project and would love to see it develop into more.
