The Weathering Report #6

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
November 30 – Dec 3, 2016
Technicity, Temporality, Embodiment: 10th International Somatechnics Conference
Byron Bay, NSW

Workshop led by Astrida Neimanis: “The Weathering Report”

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
After several days of hot hot heat in Byron, our (outdoor) workshop was inaugurated by a thunderstorm. Bring on the weather!

 

(while writing this post in [ahem] February 2018, I am listening to Weather Report on youtube.

FORECAST

Workshop description in the Conference handbook:

How might we understand and practice “weathering” as a somatechnique for embodying climate change? In the context of a dominant climate change imaginary (in the so-called developed world), this phenomenon is too often posited as distant and abstracted from our everyday experiences of weather (see e.g. Neimanis and Walker 2014; Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). Such abstraction is buttressed by either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate the ways that our bodies weather the world, and the ways in which our bodies are both archives and instruments in an ongoing gathering of climate-time. We propose that weathering as concept and practice might work as a poethical interruption to these abstractions.
 
Bringing together weather and climate change in and as the body calls for a new understanding of measurement that exceeds the aggregation of data that we take as a sign of global warming. In this paper we thus explore how technologies for measuring the weather impact upon our embodied understanding of meteorology and simultaneously ask how the body is also barometer and thermometer. In turn, how do bodies become archives of climate-time or repositories of data in ways akin to but strikingly different from an ice core.
 
Here, we present a Weathering Report that enacts our collective’s ongoing collaborative project in the art of weathering; we will unpack the theoretical underpinnings of our project, but more importantly, we will demonstrate weathering somatechniques through a series of interlaced and intra-active (Barad 2007) readings, visualizations, and short participatory activities.  In particular, we will activate weathering keywords such as scale / ants / lightening / measuring device / catchment. In doing so, we are reminded that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially “in” it. Instead, we wish to ask how activating ourselves as weather-bodies can provide new imaginaries of climate change—linking this ineffable and massive “wicked problem” to the very banal, intimate and felt experience of weather. 

 

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY

  1. Lucky Dip! Participants choose from a wide variety of instructions in small envelopes. They can spend most of the session focusing on one instruction, or they can try as many as they like.
  2. Calibrating the Weather Machines: participants were asked to collectively and collaboratively read some portions of text, marking them up as they would do in their own individual reading practices. Discussion: what do these quotes and offerings inspire? How do you interpret them? How do they articulate new patterns and vectors of connection between human bodies as weather machines, and the weather world around us?
  3. Weather-Machine-Maker: Using the props on hand (or not), design an instrument for measuring the weather. (What is ‘the weather’ that you are measuring? How will you measure it? What will your data reveal?)

 

SATELLITE IMAGES

 

WARNINGS CURRENT

Due to various kinds of weather, there may be a delay in transmission.

WEATHER MAPS

 

(from the Conference program)

LIVE READINGS

Florentien Verhage, writing about Merleau Ponty:

 

Audre Lorde:

 

Ann Cvetkovich:

 

Alfonso Lingis:

Tim Ingold:

David Abram:

Karen Barad:

 

The Weathering Report #5: The Weather Underwater / Wave Weather

DATE & LOCATION OF OBSERVATIONS
Saturday 26 November 2016
North Coogee Beach, Sydney NSW

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS
Sunny, a few clouds. Unexpected sunburns. That breeze from the sea always fools you.

FORECAST
WAVES GATHERING much interest. Plans for a dispersed weathering residency at the beach over Summer 2016.

Distant Forecast: Weathering Retreat on Grand Manan Island, North Atlantic

LATEST WEATHERING ACTIVITY
North Coogee Wave Scale, as measured on 26 November 2016:

Makes Your Knees Bend

Requires Diving Through

Causes Migration to Between-the-Flags

Pulls Your Bottom Togs Off

SATELLITE IMAGES

https://vimeo.com/255669525http://

WARNINGS CURRENT
Overheard:

“The waves — they come in waves!”

“I love the feeling of just coming out of the sea – what is it, that buoyancy you feel.”

WEATHER MAPS
Ocean weather = the wave as a relay of distant weathers; the wave here is an index of weathers not here (in part). The water and waves visiblize and sonify the weather. Waves as memories of Other Weathers.

 

LIVE READINGS
Marq DeVilliers, Windswept (2006).  In particular, we note that the last category on the Fujita Tornado Scale reads as follows:

“Fujita 6, inconceivable tornado: Sustained windes of 319 to 379 mph, but no one will ever know, because all measuring devices would be destroyed, along with pretty well everything else.”

Also from DeVilliers: a “weather bomb” : “an explosive pressure change defined as a drop of 24 millibars in twenty-four hours with a central pressure below 1000 millibars” (156) as in:

“The combination was enough to turn the new system – Ivan Redux – into a weather bomb, which as we have seen is a slightly hysterical though still technically rigorous term, defined as a system that is already at less than 1000 millibars when it drops a further 24 millibars in twenty-four hours” (284) .

Future reading: James Hamilton Patterson, The Sea and Its Thresholds

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

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 haikus

Date of exercise: Very early morning, post qi-gong
Location: Top of the hill
Weather conditions: still, bit of a breeze
Lead researcher: Rebecca
Findings: As follows

.

FullSizeRender copy

 

your cool morning breath
an exhale too quick, and slow
blows sleep from my eyes

[AN]

night, curled up below
digs stealth channels in the dirt
(my body warming you)

[AN]

o kookaburra!
your morning sense of humour
gets me every time.

[AN]

But look at that sun!
punching well above its weight
(click click, click click click)

[AN]

your pillowbreath –
a secret whispered to me
an alibi, also

[AN]

——-

Night sky at Ingar Dam
Foreign constellations swarm
and make me miss home.

[ST]

——-

Clouds on the horizon
Create a spectacular sunrise
That would be boring without them

[JH]

The sunrise is slow
But what more do you expect
From feeling the earth turn

[JH]

The sun is about to emerge
But I just got colder than before
Is that meteorology or my metabolism

[JH]

On mornings like this
The flaw in my vision
Drives me crazy

[JH]

Peach and grey start the day
Until sun crests the clouds
and then more colours emerge

[JH]

But is the sunrise slow?
Not really, says deep time
But don’t call me a speck. I say back.

[JH]

Now the sun is up
Looking where I looked before
is impossible. Too bright.

[JH]

——-

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.

Embodying climate with Nigel Clark and Yasmin Gunaratnam

This is a fantastic article on race, bodies, deep time, deep futures and climate change:

Pre-Race Post Race: Climate Change and Planetary Humanism

Gunaratnam & Clark: “The current challenge is to find imaginative ways of reasserting the significance of bodily specficity while avoiding recourse to discredited geographical or environmental determinisms – and the raciologies they have previously supported”

2016-02-21 20.40.05

They ask: “How best might we reconnect with our varying bodily inheritances when heavy weather descends?”

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