Friday Fun: The Colors of New York City's Sky

The vibrant blue hues in Mike Bodge's creative website represent the early hours of dawn in New York City.

NSKYC is a website by Mike Bodge, creative director of Lolz LLC, a New York City-based digital agency, that shows the average color of New York City’s sky, taken in five minute intervals.

Launched earlier this week, the website is the product of a program Bodge wrote to record the changing colors of the city skyscape. Inspired by the artist’s office view and strengthened with his design background, Bodge’s program instructs a webcam to take a photograph and upload the image to a server, which reads the sky portion of the image pixel by pixel. Upon surveying all of the pixels in a given image, Bodge’s program averages the values and assigns an RGB value that best represents the average color in the sky.

“Our office is at the corner of Bleecker and Crosby, and my desk is pointing straight out the window,” Bodge explains in an interview with the Village Voice. “I just stare at the view all day every day. It’s kind of crazy, you see how the sky changes, you see how the city line kind of adapts to that, with all the colors and everything. I’ve done a couple of projects where I have done timelapses and all that stuff. There are like a million timelapses of New York out there, but I wanted to distill that down to that one thing: the color that changes in the sky.”

A true entrepreneur, Bodge is already exploring ideas to commercialize his creation. “Maybe posters that have the mosaic for a day of the year,” Bodge ruminated. “So you could buy a poster that the mosaic colors of your birthday, lets say.”

The artist is even considering placing a webcam in every major city across the world, plotting the colors of the sky on a map. Using this method, Bodge’s work of art could have a real-world application. Perhaps, images taken over a longer period of time in areas struggling to implement sustainable transportation policies can serve as qualitative data.

Though NSKYC has garnered the most attention out of all of Bodge’s projects, it is by no means his first attempt to document his environment. Previously the artist built websites like Subway Crush and Williamsburg Eats to connect urban residents with local information. Bodge is currently working on a secretive transportation project that deals with taxicabs. Better keep an eye on this one!

Want to see more? Visit www.nskyc.com or follow Mike Bodge on twitter.

Right Menu Icon