Weather Report: Wind as Model, Media and Experience

This collaborative and interdisciplinary project focuses on wind as a sensed and mediated entity in contemporary culture. Wind has been modelled since the Beaufort scale or the late 19th century as scientific data that facilitates work in various test situations - from mechanical flig ht to architectural design - while persisting as deeply experienced and poetic sensation: from the vast cultural history of wind in literature and the arts to the equally rich history of gods of wind in indigenous mythology. Concentrating on the modern media cultural milieu of wind as it becomes contextualised in relation to contemporary climate, earth and ocean sciences and its various aesthetic meanings, we propose a new theorisation of wind as elemental media. Indeed, the project starts off from the hypothesis proposed by media scholar John Durham Peters that "weather is a test case for media theory". We specify this hypothesis in our project by focusing on the question: how is wind perceived? This question is specified to bodily perception, cultural context, and scientific modelling and uses so as to bring different perspectives that mediate between embodied experience, data practices and aesthetic production.

We will use this intentionally expanded scope of questions to collaboratively create new insights into perceptions of climate and climate change on both theoretical and aesthetic levels. We do so by bringing together media scholars, data visualizers, artists and atmospheric studies in the emerging field of environmental humanities through a new workshop format called "wind data salons" and by transferring our insights through articles, a conference and an exhibition. Encompassing artistic and curatorial practice, data and scientific modelling, literature and information systems, this project seeks to grasp the epistemological implications of wind as media and its ineluctable centrality for understanding and experiencing climate crises.