Your Stuff to Blow Your Mind duo is back in HowStuffWorks’ Atlanta home base after attending the World Science Festival in New York City. We’ll be sharing all we learned in a series of forthcoming blog posts and podcasts, but here’s just a little something I came across when I fit in a trip to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA):

Yes, what you’re seeing is essentially storm chasing as an art form. Belgian-born Francis Alÿs lives in Mexico City and creates works of video art that look at Mexico’s culture and landscape from various vantage points. Or, as MoMA puts it, he “uses poetic and allegorical methods to address political and social realities, such as national borders, localism and globalism, areas of conflict and community, and the benefits and detriments of progress.”

Alÿs spent the last decade working on “Tornadoes,” due to the extreme shortness of the tornado season in Mexico. ARTINFO recently conducted this interview with the artist, in which he talks about how addicting running head-first into tornadoes.  He also shares this tidbit about the meaning behind it:

The curator of the show, Mark Godfrey, saw it as being about borders, he was interested in the “in and out.” Some people were more into the piece’s pictorial dimension, the absolute monochrome when you are inside the tornado that could be an homage to Malevich and those great masters of abstraction. Some people saw it as an attempt to escape the ambient chaos of Mexico in the last years. The piece seems to be particularly open to interpretations, but I think that’s okay.

You can currently catch the full-length film as part of the MoMA’s special exhibit ” Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception.”  It runs May 8 though Aug. 1 2011.

You can also view a number of these at his official website, such as “Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing,” in which the artist pushes a melting block of ice through the streets of Mexico City. Think about it, won’t you?

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