What do we know about the weather, apart from our daily embodied experience and media weather forecasts reaching us through a vast structure  of sensing machines, databases, and prediction models? When we look up into the sky, do we understand its composition, scale, and interactions with the world we live in? Now that weather is becoming ever more extreme and deadly by nature, under the impact of a warming planet, can we relate to these changes?

On Thursday, January 19 from 8 – 11 PM, FIBER invites you to an evening of talks at Tolhuistuin where artistic and scientific perspectives on weather meet. The representation of weather has an age-old tradition within the arts, and nowadays, we trust digital culture to contribute to ‘weather literacy’. 

Location: Tolhuistuin (Amsterdam) & Online

Time: 8 – 11 PM (CEST)

Tickets: €8,50 | €6,00 (student) | €3,00 (online)

An online ticket grants you access to our online stream and link to watch the recording until 5 February (23:59 PM).

During this evening, a variety of speakers will offer different perspectives on the weather, how it changes in nature and what ways there are to read weather systems. On the one hand, this is through a scientific approach, visualising weather, and climate change, in a mathematical, historical, and data-based way. In which the translation of data into stories on a human scale also becomes apparent. On the other hand, there is a focus on artistic perspectives and research, using weather as an artistic medium. How it’s a lived experience with sensory, embodied, and socio-political effects outside of the data-sphere.

The Weatherscapes Talks aim to share knowledge on the complexity, vastness, and agency of weather systems. To foster a weather literacy, understand climate and the mechanisms behind the climate emergency, and provide a temporary meeting place for makers, thinkers, and everyone interested in art relating to weather.

TICKETS

Janette Bessembinder works at KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; since 2005) as senior advisor climate services. She is involved in climate services development, inventories of users’ requirements related to climate (change) data and information, and tailoring of climate data for users ranging from impact/adaptation researchers, companies to policy makers.

Daphne Dragona is an independent curator and writer based in Berlin. In her work she addresses issues such as the ambiguities of connectivity, the challenges of the commons, and the role of technology in an era of climate crisis. Her exhibitions have been hosted at the premises of Onassis Stegi, LABoral, Aksioma, EMST and other institutions.

Mint Park is a Seoul-born, sound, and new media artist who works at an intersection of music, technology, science, and art. In recent years she has been researching the phenomenon of turbulence and making a weather-like ecosystem of fluid dynamics with sound, air, and lights. Her audio-visual practice focuses on the experience of the inter-weaving physical environment and virtual spaces within immersive environments.

Robert-Jan Wille is a researcher and lecturer at the Freudenthal Institute, and a historian of the field sciences. He works on the history of German meteorology before and during the Wars. He has a special interest in the role of weather balloons in the mapping of the global atmosphere. He also researched the history of the life sciences in the Dutch Empire, focusing places such as the Botanical Gardens of Bogor in Indonesia.