WeatherState is an ongoing project that critically investigates senses of place within the vast heterotopias of the world oceans. In the face of the climate crisis, these enigmatic realms hold profound significance as regulators of global temperatures, absorbing carbon dioxide, shaping weather patterns, and world trade. They act as analogous spaces, as isomorphs for the complexity of embodied understandings of the interconnectedness and entanglements of our current times. Through data mapping and generative (algorithmic) approaches, and harnessing algorithmic thinking, big data, and AI, the WeatherState system maps the historical and cultural complexities of these heterotopias, and presents an immersive, generative screen experience of a complex relational set of data.
As a dataecology, WeatherState interrogates the role of oceans as conduits for trade and cultural colonialism, by drawing on historical data sets (the Southern Oscillation Index), the Beaufort Scale (developed in 1805 to help western sailors estimate the winds via visual observations) and combined with 21st century techniques, the OpenWeatherMap API, WeatherState presents a world of interconnected phenomena. The aim is for an embodied, sensorial experience of data that builds on current data visualisation practices and pays attention to the ecologies of practice that drive the data selection, presentation and mapping.
WeatherState is a live multichannel experience that seeks to generate an affect of aliveness, challenging extractive modes of visualisation.
This project was developed using Reaktor, Touch Designer, python and OpenWeatherMap.
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