Author: Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Open post

The Weathering Report #11

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Friday February 9, 2018

Skype (Newtown, Sydney University, King’s Cross and the University of New England)

 

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS

Physical human beings discretely situated in different places, with different (but probably quite similar) interior conditions, connected in discussion by cable and wi-fi and computer and lots of energy

 

FORECAST

A less ambitious year than the non-existent Master Vision of 2017. 2018 will be a year of “intentional adhockery”. Or, a year of epistolary weatherings, parcels of weather sent and received and archived online. Hopefully with one or two fleshy meetings of two, or three or four of us. Of course, we are all weathering alone and together all the time. But there’s something about bodies in proximity that we agree is special.


SATELLITE IMAGES

 

WARNINGS CURRENT

Letters to be sent to each other in 2018. Private address book to be maintained by the collective.

Photographs of correspondence to be uploaded to blog developing some kind of archive.

Printing to be done on Big Fag press (at least one of the big plans from 2017 coming to fruition, surprisingly! – with some serious intentional adhockery)

 

OVERHEARD:

“intentional adhockery”

“letter writing! / can we send each other parcels of weather?”

LIVE READINGS

Open post

The Weathering Report #10

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS:

13th & 14th June, 2017 on Rindö Island in the Stockholm Archipelago

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS

All weathers were experienced, except snow and night.

Cosmic: daylight, civic twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight

Meteorologic: Sun (bright, dull), wind (strong, gentle), rain (light, heavy), fog (thick, misty), rainbow (overland, overwater)

 

FORECAST

Two days of “The Weathering Lab” as part of the Wild Weatheirng Collaboratory. A workshop designed to experiment with some of the tactics developed by the weathering collective with early childhood educators and academics in Sweden, Australia and Canada.

 

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY:

Designed by Astrida Neimanis & Jennifer Mae Hamilton, drawing inspiration from the whole Weathering Collective

Tactics for Weathering I: Weather Mapping

Tactics for Weathering II: Measurement and Management

Tactics for Weathering III: Cosmic Weathers, Radical Alterity and Embodied Extrospection

Tactics for Weathering IV: Speculative Design for Better Weathering

Tactics for Weathering V: Weathering Debrief

 

SATELLITE IMAGES

 

WARNINGS CURRENT:
This post is a work in progress. Warnings will be reported soon!

OVERHEARD: TBA

LIVE READINGS: TBA

The Weathering Report #8: Ecocritical Field Experiments on Observatory Hill

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Wednesday May 11, 2017
Observatory Hill, NSW

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS

Phenomenally perfect weather, according to Jennifer Hamilton (1/5th of Weathering), who took her NYU Sydney “Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Ecocriticism” students out for the afternoon. We caught the last rays of orange sun, and watched it set over the great dividing range for the last class of the semester.

FORECAST

How can we sense climate change by attuning ourselves differently to the weather?

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY

Worksheet – Download Here

SATELLITE IMAGES

WARNINGS CURRENT

Overheard:

“This is actually perfect weather”

“I don’t want to leave Sydney”

“I wish all classes would be outside”

 

WEATHER MAPS

Lost in transit

 

LIVE READINGS

Neimanis, Astrida & Rachel Lowen Walker “Weathering: Climate Change and the Thick Time of Transcorporeality”

Open post

The Weathering Report #7: Ecocritical Experiments at Bronte Beach

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Thursday December 15, 2016
Bronte Beach, NSW

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
Cool and cloudy early-summer day, with intermittent light rain and light winds. Jennifer Hamilton (1/5th of Weathering) took her NYU Sydney “Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Ecocriticism” students to the beach. We gathered barefoot, put our toes in the water and considered what they’ve learned in the semester. The water was warmer than the air. The waves were big and stormy.

FORECAST
How can we translate theoretical learning and the reading of fiction into conventional professions such as journalism, NGO service and policy making?

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
Choose an envelope. Engage in considering your body and weather. Standing sitting raising arms up, reflect. How is the weather different in different postures? How can you feel the weather and the world in your breath? Images from this activity are included below.

We also played the Game of Global Futures as a way of escaping the rain.

SATELLITE IMAGES

2016-12-15-17-01-53

img_20170110_153731717

img_20170110_153749625

img_20170110_153827842

2016-12-15-18-11-26

WARNINGS CURRENT
Overheard:

“When I breathe I feel cleansed, as though the dirtiness of my body gets exhaled”

“When I breathe I feel like the dirt is coming inward”

“Let us go to a cafe and have pizza and tea and shelter from the rain and play the Game of Global Futures”

“President Beyoncé”


WEATHER MAPS
Thinking about the waves as displaced weathers (See “Weather Maps” on https://weatherings.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/the-weathering-report-5-the-weather-underwater-wave-weather/) took on a new dimension in this session. The body of water known as the Pacific Ocean connects Australia to the USA. In putting our toes in the water while weathering we were experiencing that connection.

LIVE READINGS
Tsing, Anna & Pollman, Elizabeth. “Global Futures: The Game”. Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding (eds), Histories of the Future (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): 105-122.

 

Open post

The Weathering Map Update

Getting ready for our contribution to Chart Collective, Tessa and Jen spent Wednesday afternoon discussing how to represent our collective microclimates on a “map” given 2/3rds of the collective were not in the same general location.

The questions of the discussion:

  • How to represent weather that is not connected to place?
  • How to represent a collaboration that is geographically unevenly spaced?
  • What is the thing that links us?
  • How to move from the epochal anthropocenic scale of climate change to the mundane, everyday personal microclimate?

Images of Weather Maps:

  • Climate graphs represent time and are terrible ways of representing the lived experience of climate: https://theconversation.com/februarys-global-temperature-spike-is-a-wake-up-call-56341
  • Old weather maps are pretty: https://www.kshs.org/cool3/graphics/weathermap1884.jpg / https://hvfarmscape.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/slide35.jpg (this map was drawn one week before Tessa’s grandmother left Germany).
  • William Dawes’s first map of Sydney – a very incomplete grasp of place. Potentially analogous to our grasp of climate http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/image/4204572-3×2-700×467.jpg (possibly analogous to a weather map without place)
  • Google offers no help on the question “how to represent time?” – https://www.google.com.au/search?q=how+to+represent+time&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjcxY2lkpPOAhXIjZQKHcxhAvYQ_AUICCgB
  • Tessa’s wind map is really interesting: https://weatherings.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/map1.jpg

We thought that the topographical layer of the standard weather map is limiting our imaginations and that climate and time

– PERSONAL MICROCLIMATE AS CITIZEN SCIENCE VERSION OF CLIMATE CHANGE  The only way we get a sense of the average is through personal observation of trends

– REDUNDANT MICROCLIMATES OF OLD BUILDINGS / THE MICROCLIMATES OF INCOMPLETE RENOVATIONS – how the build environment and the ideologies of private property, stages of technological development and personal need intersect to produce microclimates

– THE WEATHERING MAP is more about climate than weather, old weather maps, however, provide a pool of resources for visualisation. Place does not unite us. We are united in our living present in this moment of epochal time.

Summary Notes:

[27/07/2016 6:24:17 pm] Jennifer Hamilton: To represent how these microclimates (repeatedly felt body weather) are linked to climate chage
[27/07/2016 6:24:31 pm] Jennifer Hamilton: repeatedly felt and/or observed
[27/07/2016 6:25:45 pm] Jennifer Hamilton: there is a duration to all these microclimates

 

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

Exercise: Weather that Annoys and Irritates

Date of exercise: 29 January
Location: Cooks River near Gough Whitlam Park
Weather conditions: sunny, warm
Lead researcher: Jennifer
Findings: As follows

ice_dam_front_house

The task was to contemplate negative affect and weather, to consider personal tipping-points. The idea was to think through at what point we are all negatively impacted by the weather, what are the circumstances beyond the weather, what are the dimensions that make it annoying.

ANSWERS:

  • Bike riding into a headwind
  • Damp bedrooms in Sydney
  • Dangerous icicles that hang off eaves that are actually lethal and thus the shelter provided by the eaves is moot.
  • Similarly, trees in Western Australia that provide necessary shade, but randomly drop limbs in hot weather to support the life of the plant.
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