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.
In WeatherState, I trace the materiality and relationality of the datasets, treating them not as neutral or raw information but as embodied entities that carry historical, cultural, and ecological values. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concept of neo-cartographies, which emphasises the situated and relational nature of knowledge production, this project views data as a mapped material—deeply embedded within power structures, histories of extraction, and environmental processes. Rather than presenting data as objective or static, WeatherState acknowledges that it is inherently shaped by the systems that generate and interpret it.
By integrating historical datasets like the Southern Oscillation Index and the Beaufort Scale with modern real-time data from the OpenWeatherMap API, WeatherState challenges the notion of “raw data” and instead highlights how all data is already mediated—infused with meaning, politics, and affect. This approach foregrounds the embodied values and biases inherent in how data is collected, processed, and visualized, revealing the interconnectedness between human activity, technological systems, and the oceans’ changing health.
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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