Up-Dates on Weather

ClimArt, situated within ZK/U Berlin, focuses on raising awareness and mobilizing urban climate resilience through artistic interventions. The collaborative research between metaLAB and ClimArt investigates in/visibilities of climate change through case studies, prototypes, and strategic interventions. The project challenges the politics of truths and data representations from the perspectives of artistic and practice-based research.

Project Context

The current knowledge system about climate change predominantly relies on a planetary-scaled sensing system — a technological megastructure that abstracts nature into data, transforms data into analysis, and converts analysis into predictions. Technological advances seemingly enable multispecies communication, non-human decentralized autonomous organizations, and generative species models. However, this abstraction and symbolization of the world raise numerous questions.

Up-Dates on Weather seeks to reframe and reimagine our perceptions of such data to explore how political claims, urban politics, and cultural agency create new possibilities for sensual, textual, and visual experiences. In the first phase of the project, we display examples of spatial and temporal entanglements of everyday, seemingly unspectacular weather data.

Research Focus

We critically reconsider weather data as part of a historical and cultural continuum, structured by textual and visual programs that commemorate or prefigure narratives of common purpose, origin, or future. Our research focuses on the underlying mechanisms of visual representation of universalist narratives of the past and the future by algorithms, reflecting on the abstraction of nature.

In this context, we explore the contact zones between climate conditions and bee-cultures, specifically at the “Moabiter Stadtgarten” and ZK/U sites. We combine and compare these with additional data collections and their representations.

Key Questions

This approach addresses fundamental questions:

• What roles do data, algorithms, machine learning, network structures, and sensing devices play between species and in relation to non-species?
• What networked agency emerges between humans, bees, rainfall, and data?
• What concept of temperature is captured in data, and what truth is neglected by doing so?

Goals and Public Engagement

Up-Dates on Weather aims to trace in-betweenness, hybridity, and the grotesque dimensions of algorithms and data as versions of how technology constructs new human and non-human relationships. By exhibiting visualizations and objects, we aim to make these complex relationships accessible to a broad public audience. Upcoming activities in close cooperation with ClimArt include an exhibition at ZK/U, participating within a podcast series, an educational seminar at Freie Universität Berlin, and more.