Weather Reports

Wind as media, model, experience

Funded by:






Wind art collection

About

How is wind perceived? In this AHRC & DFG funded, interdisciplinary research project, we investigate the nature of wind as model, media, and experience, triangulating embodied experience, data practices, and aesthetic production. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of what changes with climate change through the medium of wind, drawing on research from across the Environmental Humanities and Media Studies.

Wind focalises the larger epistemological and ontological problems we face in light of climate change. Like climate, wind is not an immediate, conspicuous object of perception. Wind surrounds us and is experienced continuously in varying degrees of intensity, without ever appearing directly ‘before our eyes’. Like climate, wind’s ephemeral nature–second only to barometric pressure–motivates a turn to instruments, measurement, calculation, abstraction, and modelling in order to arrive at an objective, scientific perspective on wind. Like climate, wind draws together different spatial and temporal scales. Local winds tie into global atmospheric circulation, becoming both an effect and agent of climate change, given their role in desertification, in changing circulation patterns, and intensifying storms.

In order to make sense of wind as something both experienced and measured, local and global, we explore the elemental nature of wind through three different perspectives: wind as model, media, and experience. We here follow Media Studies’ recent turn toward the elemental.

Instructed by the phenomenon of wind, this project opens up new perspectives for refiguring the relationship between model, media, and experience in light of climatic changes across temporal and spatial scales. We then hope to contribute to a better understanding of experiences of climate change through the medium of wind.

Members

Professor Ryan Bishop

is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK). In addition to co-editing the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP), he co-edits with Jussi Parikka the book series Technicities (Edinburgh UP) and a Cultural Politics Book series (Duke). His most recent book is Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (2020) co-authored with John Beck (available OA). His current research is on large-scale sensing systems, military technology and aesthetic production, and the technicalities of perception.

Professor Birgit Schneider

is professor for Knowledge Cultures and Media Environments in the Department of European Media Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She studied art and media studies as well as media art and philosophy in Karlsruhe, London and Berlin. After initially working as a graphic designer, she worked from 2000 to 2007 at the research department “The Technical Image” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she received her doctorate. Since 2009, she has been researching in the context of fellowships at the European Media Studies Department of the University of Potsdam as well as in Munich, Weimar and Cambridge, UK. Her current research focuses are images and perceptions of nature, ecology and climate change, diagrams, data graphics and maps as well as images of ecology.

Professor Jussi Parikka

is Professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University as well as Professor of Technological Culture & Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art. He also leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture at FAMU, Prague. In 2021, he was elected as member of Academia Europaea. With Ryan Bishop he co-edits the the book series Technicities (Edinburgh UP). His books include Insect Media (2010), A Geology of Media (2015), and most recently, the co-authored The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022, with Darren Wershler and Lori Emerson). His co-edited book Photography off the Scale came out in 2021 and the monograph Operational Images. From Visual to Invisual Culture in 2023.

Dr Laura Cinti

is a research based artist, co-director of art collective C-LAB and research fellow at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She works within the intersections of biodiversity, space science and genetics. More recently, her artworks have focused on drone technology and artificial intelligence. She was the recipient of the Roots and Seeds Production Award (2021-2022) to develop an artwork addressing the ongoing biodiversity crisis. This work, Living Dead: On the trail of a female received a S+T+ARTS Prize 2023 Nomination and won the MUSE Digital Art Award 2023. Recently, she won the NOVA_XX Award as part of the COAL Prize 2023 to develop AI in the Sky for the Biennale Nova_XX 2024 at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles | Paris.

Dr Maximilian Gregor Hepach

is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Potsdam and project coordinator of Weather Reports. He recently completed his PhD on the phenomenology of climate and its changes in Geography at the University of Cambridge. Most recently, he has published in the Journal of Historical Geography and Progress in Human Geography. His research interests include phenomenology, media theory, and cultural geography.

Previous members

Dr JR Carpenter

is an artist, writer, and researcher working on questions of place, displacement, migration, and climate change across performance, print, and digital media. Her digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Her debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2018. Her most recent collection This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2020. She was Writer in Residence at University of Alberta 2020-2021 and is currently a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Winchester School of Art.

Publications

Member publications

Carpenter, JR. Le plaisir de la côte / The Pleasure of the Coast. Pamenar Press, 2023.

Parikka, Jussi. Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.

Hepach, Maximilian Gregor. "Sauerian phenomenology: German Theory and Carl Sauer's The Morphology of Landscape." Geographica Helvetica 78, (2023): 467–478.

Schneider, Birgit. Der Anfang einer neuen Welt: Wie wir uns den Klimawandel erzählen, ohne zu verstummen. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2023.

Schneider, Birgit. “Atmo-Medien Und Atmo-Ästhetik Des Windes. Eine Geschichte Der Sichtbarmachungen Parahumaner Kräfte Durch Stellvertreter.” In Parahumane Bilder, edited by Carolin Lano, Lars Nowak, Peter Podrez, and Nicole Wiedenmann. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2021.

Schneider, Birgit. “Sublime Aesthetics in Times of Climate Crisis? A Critique.” In Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee. London: Routledge, 2021.

Hepach, Maximilian Gregor. “Is Climate Real?” The Philosopher 109, no. 3 (2021): 47–53.

Bishop, Ryan, and Tania Roy. “Frictionless Sovereignty and the Oceanic Claim: Bio-Aesthetic Engagements.” Boundary 2online 5, no. 2 (2020).

Carpenter, J.R. This Is a Picture of Wind. Sheffield: Longbarrow Press, 2020.

Parikka, Jussi. “A Recursive Web of Models: Studio Tomás Saraceno’s Working Objects as Environmental Humanities.” Configurations. A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 28, no. 3 (2020): 309–32.

Bishop, Ryan. “Felo de Se: The Munus of Remote Sensing.” Boundary 2online 45, no. 9 (2018): 41–63.

Carpenter, J. R. This Is a Picture of Wind. 2018. Web-app.

Hepach, Maximilian Gregor. “A Phenomenology of Weather and Qi.” Journal of Japanese Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2018): 43–65.

Schneider, Birgit. Klimabilder: Eine Genealogie globaler Bildpolitiken von Klima und Klimawandel. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018.

Carpenter, J.R. The Gathering Cloud. Devon: Uniformbooks, 2017.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Sensed Smog: Smart Ubiquitous Cities and the Sensorial Body.” Fibreculture 29 (2017).

Bishop, Ryan “Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous Systems.” In Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetic, edited by J Beck and R Bishop, 273–88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

Carpenter, J. R. The Gathering Cloud. 2016. Web.

Schneider, Birgit. “Burning Worlds of Cartography: A Critical Approach to Climate Cosmograms of the Anthropocene.” Geo: Geography and Environment 3, no. 2 (2016): e00027.

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Project publications

forthcoming

Events

19 January 2023
Wind and rain: Namibian phenomenologies of weather
Potsdam, Germany

31 May–2 June 2023
Environmental Data, Media, and the Humanities (a Digital Humanities Hackathon)
Potsdam, Germany

11 June–17 September 2023
Critical Environmental Data: The Environmental Audiotour at Helsinki Biennial
Helsinki, Finland

30 May 2024
Public Seminar Weather Reports at John Hansard Gallery
Southampton, UK

27–28 June 2024
Elementare Medien
Potsdam, Germany

24 October 2024
Von Atmosphären und Sinnhorizonten
Potsdam, Germany

13 November 2024
Attentive observation
Potsdam, Germany

Keynotes

September 2022
“Surface Sensing” (Jussi Parikka) at
Aesthetics of Machine Vision

January 2023
“Kräfte, Ströme, Strahlen: Luft als technisches Medium, Coference” (Birgit Schneider) at
Medienökologien der Luft

Related Conferences & Exhibitions

24–25 September 2022
“This is not a good sign” at Digital Design Weekend
V&A London, UK

23–25 September 2022
Forests of antennas, oceans of waves:
An exploration of art and theory in electromagnetic urban environments
Berlin, Germany

26 September–4 October 2022
Everything Will Be Fine, an outdoor exhibition
Berlin, Germany

26 October 2022
Weather, Words, and the Body
London, UK

12–13 January 2023
Medienökologien der Luft:
Bild- und Geschichtstheorien der Unsichtbarkeiten
Bielefeld, Germany

26 January 2023
Public Life - Sharon H. Venne
Southampton, UK/Online

15-17 February 2023
The Coronavirus Pandemic:
An Environmental Humanities Perspective
Vienna, Austria

13 March 2023
Sense and Visibility:
Multisensory Experience and Representation of the Environment beyond the Visual
Hamburg, Germany

21 June 2023
Coal: Plant!
Laboratoire Espace Cerveau, Paris, France

23 November-12 December 2023
MUSE THE ENERGY FOR TOMORROW
Museo Nazionale d'Arte Digitale, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy

6 December 2023
SANS RÉSERVE
Museum of Hunting and Nature (Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature), Paris, France

16 February–27 April 2024
Biennale NOVA_XX 2024 : Plurivers & Contingence
Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris, France

Related projects