Archive
Strange Weathers
I am very happy that our Strange Weathers special issue of Neural Magazine is out! It includes new texts, reviews, and interviews with for example Karolina Sobecka, Superflux, Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, Open Weather, and Jana Winderen. Co-edited with Daphne Dragona, the special issue follows on from our Weather Engines exhibition in Athens (2022, Onassis Stegi) as well as the book we published in that context: Words of Weather, a new vocabulary for a political ecology.
In further news, the exhibition and public program will be continued in Spain in Autumn 2023. A separate announcement on that is forthcoming. In the meantime, enjoy the special issue (and considering subscribing to Neural – or recommending your library to do that).
The cover of the special issue features Sophie Dyer from Open Weather group, from their workshop in Athens in 2022.
In conversation with Ricky Ruihong Li and Isabelle A. Tan
A new interview has been published in November magazine where we discuss all kinds of topics from the Weather Engines exhibition and the Words of Weather book to (digital) aesthetics, media theory, design and architecture, slow violence, environmental media and more.
Excerpt:
JP
The book grew out of the “Weather Engines” exhibition and a curatorial research project with Daphne Dragona. But, Words of Weather is not a catalog of the exhibition in the conventional sense. It is a glossary in which certain terms for weather entangle with the curatorial premises and strategies unfolding in the gallery space. We did not want it to be a direct document indexing or interpreting the exhibited work. It is not saying and pointing, “this piece here is about weather,” etc. Instead, we wanted it to account for discussions that grew in parallel to what happened in the gallery. It is a document of indirect dialogues, so to speak: a kind of discursive reverberation of the exhibition.
I like to think of this book as a glossary of political ecology. As straightforward as the term “weather” may sound, the glossary acknowledges that in the age of climate change, extreme weather and environmental calamity must be understood within a broader context of what’s been called elemental media and culture. Weather moves between material and political registers, between knowing and experiencing.
IAT
Yes. We love how the book collects and relays terms on the weather. It is (literally) a glossary. At the same time, these terms are not definitions but conversations recorded as short-form essays.
JP
We did not want a book by theorists, with a capital T, but a compendium of different forms of knowledge. We wanted to gather a mix of words generated by theorists and historians as well as by a diverse set of epistemic practices, from artists, architects, writers, filmmakers, and others. The catalog is another reference of the project, a parallel textual space to the otherwise audio-visual exhibition. We insisted that the book carry the project forward, beyond the exhibition in Athens. Without revealing too much, the whole project will have a new edition in 2023 in another country and institution.
[…]
RRL
I imagine this shaped the work you did and how you worked in “Weather Engines.” How might one look at theory as a cultural technique? And does that bring to bear another set of questions?
JP
This was at the center of many discussions I had with Daphne during the curation of the exhibition: how do we talk about the combination of environmental justice and nonhuman agency? How not to lose sight of one or the other? How to curate this into the show in ways that builds many of the issues from ground up, through the works, not merely as theoretical statements. The many axes of the issues are represented by works such as Susan Schuppli’s Cold Cases on the weaponization of temperature in human rights violations across Canada and the US; the powerful film 4 Waters by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman; and Felipe Castelblanco’s 2-channel film Upriver on clouds, sovereignty and aerial violence through fumigation for example .
The conference we organized as part of the “Weather Engines” public program continued such questions of environmental violence in concrete and conceptual cases, for example, Nabil Ahmed who has examined the notion of ecocide in his work from writings to the work INTERPRT does.
Read the full interview here.
Felipe Castelblanco, Rio Arriba / Upriver, installation view at Weather Engines, Onassis Stegi, Athens (2021).
Image credits: Stelios Tzetzias
Leonardo Reviews: Climate and Weather
The new batch of Leonardo (online) reviews includes both my short text on Yuriko Furuhata’s recent book Climatic Media as well as a review of the Words of Weather collection edited by me and Daphne Dragona. As Michael Punt points out in his review, “As such Words of Weather is possibly both a material and intellectual marker that the weather is no longer subsets of other disciplines but has acquired obtained an autonomy that might allow us to talk about it in relation to human agency.”
Same could be said about the topic of Furuhata’s book which amounts to one genealogy of geoengineering or at least, weather modification of the Cold War period.
“Furuhata’s book brings out well the range of techniques and their institutional affiliations to ground the epistemic underpinning of atmospheric control and elemental media. Computer simulations, meteorological knowledge, but also the sort of climactic and communication experiments as staged for example at Expo ’67 in Montreal and Expo ’70 in Osaka play here a role. Here the example of artificial fog by Nakaya Fujiko becomes an example that also ties, again, the two sides of the Pacific together when it comes to art and technology experiments.”
Both books could said to combine themes from environmental media studies with readings of, as well as experiments in, art-science-technology.
Words of Weather is available for purchase online – both in Greek and in English.
Words of Weather out soon
As part of the Weather Engines exhibition we have edited the book Words of Weather, a glossary for terms for weather , out soon in English and Greek. Details where to order coming soon. Below a sneak peak at the wonderful roster of contributors and terms.
Weather Engines in April
We are happy to announce the list of artists for our Weather Engines exhibition, curated by Daphne Dragona and myself, which opens in April in Athens at Onassis Stegi. You can find more information about the exhibition as well as the opening program online and below you can find our curatorial text. Also the book Words of Weather, a glossary for terms for weather, will be out by end of March. More on that in a separate blog post.
Weather Engines artists list
Kat Austen, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Felipe Castelblanco, Kent Chan, Coti K., Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, DESIGN EARTH, Matthias Fritsch, Geocinema, Abelardo Gil-Fournier & Jussi Parikka, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Hypercomf, Lito Kattou, Zisis Kotionis, Manifest Data Lab, Barbara Marcel, Matterlurgy, Petros Moris, Sybille Neumeyer, Afroditi Psarra & Audrey Briot, Susan Schuppli, Rachel Shearer & Cathy Livermore, Stefania Strouza, Superflux, Paky Vlassopoulou, Thomas Wrede
Weather Engines curatorial text
“Weather Engines” explores the poetics, politics, and technologies of the environment from the ground to the sky, and from soil to atmosphere.
Weather can be described as a dynamical system of wind, pressure, temperature, and humidity, which affects both human and nonhuman worlds. It changes from moment to moment and differs from place to place, while being forecasted in the attempt to control its effects. Weather observation has turned out to be part of the attempts to modify weather from experimental military projects to technological responses to mitigate climate change. The weather, though, is more than any physical fact in meteorological knowledge. It can also refer to different atmospheres which can be metaphorical or political and related to breathing and living.
The “Weather Engines” exhibition features artistic works that ask questions of weather, the environment, and technological culture. The installations, images, as well as video, sound, and sculptural works take the climate crisis as a starting point, investigating the elements that engineer our lives. Heat and cold, wind and rain are discussed in relation to different geographical and political contexts from past to present and speculative futures. Oceans, clouds, and forests are acknowledged as life-sustaining engines creating the atmosphere that we are inhabiting but also affecting. Meteorological instruments as well as natural bioindicators are the focal point of works that explore how weather phenomena are captured and studied. Other projects examine and expose the exploitation and weaponization of bad or extreme weather.
The artworks outline an environmental aesthetics that also addresses climate justice. The exhibition brings to view the conflicts in describing, experiencing, and resisting colonial weather and atmospheres. In the age of anthropogenic climate, all weather is artificial. If all weather is made, then this also means that there is still the potential to struggle for the weathers and climates we would rather want to live in.
Weather Engines interview on Resonance FM
Here’s a recent radio interview recording about the Weather Engines project (2021/2022) funded by the Onassis Stegi (Athens). It also includes a discussion of the new film piece by Matterlurgy called “Hydromancy”, on at the Hansard Gallery in Southampton (do visit) as well as online. The work emerges from a residency at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, a co-commission by the John Hansard Gallery and Onassis Stegi.
A thank you to Jude Montagu for this chat.
Hydromancy by Matterlurgy
Hydromancy by Matterlurgy is a new film and installation on at the John Hansard Gallery (JHG). It is a commission by the JHG and Onassis Stegi (Athens) as part of our on-going Weather Engines project that I am curating with Daphne Dragona.
You can see it on the large digital screens at the Hansard in Southampton (and next year installed in Athens) but also online:
https://jhg.art/video/matterlurgy-hydromancy/
Hydromancy is “filmed on location at the University of Southampton’s National Oceanography Centre, a globally renowned centre for developing technologies that investigate the world’s oceans, earth systems and biosphere, Hydromancy blends documentary with artistic intervention, considering the ocean as both a sensory environment and scientific object. As viewers, we visit a coral lab bathed in blue light, an engineering workshop, and enter a room bubbling with algae and phytoplankton.”
Machinology 