The Weathering Report #3

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Thursday 17 March, 2016.
John Woolley Building, University of Sydney, Camperdown NSW

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
Dry, stuffy. Dusty. Hot. Sweaty bodies. Sunlight from the window.

FORECAST
Small to medium chance of weathering report books in next 12 months. See Warnings Current.

Of increasing interest in the coming phase: temporalities of weather (predictive time / pre-emptive times) and instrumentalities of weather.

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
Bec’s tweets during the meeting, which lasted a few hours:

SATELLITE IMAGES

 

 

WARNINGS CURRENT
Milky mammalian weather brewing in Armidale Weather-Body. Bad skype connection.

Otherwise,

  • Mid-term evacuation procedures for Weathering #4 under review:
    – Walter de Maria Lightning Field (US)
    – Fowler’s Gap, NSW (UNSW art research station)
    – Rocky Mountains back country
    – camping somewhere in AUS with John Wolseley
  • Conference presentations, late 2016 highly probable (ASLEC-ANZ Global Ecologies / Somatechnics, Byron Bay). Panel proposal or co-authored papers.
  • Hosting a walk/talk with Frances Bodkin of Mt Annan Botanic Garden, in Sept/Oct. Deep time climatology.
  • Series of occasional print publications – a kind of slow weather bulletin – that each document one exercise. Eg. An attempt to print the moon ?!

WEATHER MAPS
not available

LIVE READINGS
Ernie Dillard – Total Eclipse

The Weathering Report #2

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
21-23 Feb, 2016, Ingar Dam, Blue Mountains. “The quality of the water can be measured by the life forms present.”

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
*conducive to swimming and fire-in-the-evening.

  • Tessa Zettel – totally present
  • Kate Wright – around 4 months pregnant and looking for a comfy bed
  • Stephanie Springgay – incubating amoeba
  • Sarah Truman – ditto
  • Astrida Neimanis – slept well
  • Jennifer Hamilton – grumpy and happy
  • Rebecca Giggs – (Bush Google)

FORECAST
By spending 3 days and 2 nights in closer contact with the weather, might we develop methods for reading and responding to weather differently?

Loosely structured: Conversation, collaboration, conviviality (eating, swimming, walking, fire, talking, contemplation, movement, writing)

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
Feb 21

  • 10 am: depart Sydney
  • 2 pm: arrive Ingar Dam; set up camp; eat lunch (vegan sushi and sandwiches + nutritional yeast)
  • late afternoon: scouting sites, personal settling in, napping
  • Evening: collective trip to the High Ground to plan for the next day and a half. Swimming, fire, food (chickpea tagine)

Feb 22

  • Sunrise: qi gong, haiku, bodyweathering at the High Ground
  • A.M.: breakfast (pancakes & veggie sausage), JMH, TZ, AN – hike to the creek
  • Lunch: quiches and salads
  • PM: writing exercises: disciplined extrospection and weather ecologies; group discussion under the trees [TZ: moss + lichen; AN: ecotone of the dam (tadpole weather); SS/ST: rocks; KW: ants; BG: burrowing; JMH: picnic table]
  • Evening: dinner (burritos) + swimming + fire (with portwine)

Feb 23:

  • Sunrise – swimming or not
  • Morning: breakfast (quinoa porridge); packdown; future planning (see “Warnings”); departure.


OBSERVATIONS

  • supervisor/supervisee relationship
  • red wine is now too warm in Europe
  • hairy ball theorem is the maximum amount of hurricanes that the world can handle
  • ‘through wind’ – old latvian women complaining and precipitating the need for a sweater, always
  • Open the door so the wind can blow the soul out of the house (Jewish)
  • elixir field and pa fung (fear of wind)
  • how all kinds of species form an ecology of weather (eg. ants as markers/indicators)
  • tropopause (Bush Google)
  • gravity as an ecological force
  • what is that smell before rain (acutally)? (Petrichor? KW?)
  • some people make dangerous fires
  • there is something interesting about Captain Frederick Maury (1887?)
  • caterpillars liquify before becoming butterflies

See here for results of some of our experimentation.

SATELLITE IMAGES

DSCF2767  DSCF2769IMG_0977  IMG_0974

WARNINGS CURRENT
Thinking about going bigger and deeper.

We will meet again in March for Weathering #3 in Sydney.

Other prospects:

  • Ganguddy in the winter
  • Banff residency in 2017
  • epistolary projects
  • Presentations in late 2016 (ASLEC-ANZ Global Ecologies; Summer Institute of the Antipodes; Somatechnics)
  • chapbook
  • methods article

Question: How do you 3D print the weather?

WEATHER MAPS

map1  map2

wind maps by Tessa – Sat 5:30pm (ish), 10 mins, top of hill  / Mon lunchtime, 7 mins, campground

LIVE READINGS

  • Karen Barad – Transmaterialities
  • Alphonso Lingis: “weather is neither substance nor subject” (Dangerous Emotions)
  • Jeffrey Cohen – Stone
  • Lawrence Bunuel on disciplined extrospection
  • Eve Sedgwick – Nationalisms and Sexualities

The Weathering Report #1

Welcome to the very first Weathering Report, an irregular account of our collaborative endeavours as they unfold.

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
29 Jan, 2016, Cook’s River, Marrickville

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
In both the dominant environmental imaginary and empirical scientific study, climate change is too often posited as distant and abstracted from our everyday experiences of weather. Either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past buttress such abstraction. Both largely obfuscate the ways that our bodies weather the world and are part of the changing climate.

FORECAST
Working together in a new collaborative configuration, we propose the concept and practice of weathering as a “poethical” interruption to these abstractions — as a way to radically localise, or embody, the global phenomenon of climate change. Over the coming months/years, we look forward to exploring, devising and sharing different approaches to meteorology as a multispecies endeavour, paying particular attention to the temporalities and instrumentalities of weather as it is encountered and understood by different bodies.

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
After some months of percolation, our first meeting took place on a hot late-January afternoon. Hosted by Astrida in Marrickville, we spent a few happy hours in a shady nook of the Cook’s River, sharing texts, exercises and possibilities. On the agenda were turning verbs into action, scientific poetry and problems that are uninhabitable. Jen led a short exercise in list-making (‘When weather annoys me’), and Stephanie brought along a makeshift wind-drawing device constructed from a bucket, some string and a pencil.

Here are Bec’s notes:

  • “Your teeth and how to keep them”;
  • Transcorporeal bodies;
  • Torquing; 
  • Exodeviance;
  • Language adequate to experience; 
  • Beaufort wind scale; 
  • Naturalising the boiling point of water—a fiction on which celsius is founded; 
  • Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (terrestrial bodies); 
  • Silent design; 
  • “De-thing-ify the body” said Kate W; 
  • Why would a feminist only be interested in the human?;
  • Water divining; 
  • Writing is inadequate; 
  • How we have swallowed barometers; 
  • Wind-socks on the head; 
  • ‘Prospect and refuge’, where you sit in a room. 
  • And in response to Jen’s weather exercise—1. ‘widow-makers’, the big eucalypts in dry high wind; 2. rips; 3. stinger weather, overcast, still hot days; 4. being cold, cold feet, the trouble of winter shoes; 5. Taking the weather with you; 6. storm-food (inevitably cheese sandwiches with margarine on white bread).  

SATELLITE IMAGES

weathering

WARNINGS CURRENT
On the horizon for us: a collective residency somewhere out of the city, to feel the weather on a different time scale and in less protective surroundings.

WEATHER MAPS
The weather of one’s stride as one walks from the Cook’s River to Church St as measured by a plastic bucket, a string, a piece of paper, a pencil, movement and time.

  

 

LIVE READINGS
CA Conrad
Germaine Greer – White Beach
Merleau-Ponty – Lectures on Nature

 

Stay tuned for the Occasional Weathering Report Supplement, a micro print-publication set to accompany these online reports.

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