Weather Reports – Wind as Model, Media, and Experience

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Birgit Schneider
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468455590

This collaborative and interdisciplinary project focuses on wind as an aesthetic, sensed, and mediated entity in contemporary culture. Wind has been modelled since late 19th century as scientific data that facilitates work in various test situations – from mechanical flight 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 as rich history of gods of wind in indigenous mythology. Concentrating on the modern media cultural context 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. Wind, as is true for climate in many cases, is perceived through proxies, media and abstractions. Such proxies and abstractions (representation at large) have long figured in the intellectual inquiry of the investigative the project’s collaborative research team.We will use this intentionally expanded scope of questions to collaboratively and interdisciplinarily 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 and during 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.The team avail themselves of the complementary arts/humanities and science facilities at two major research institutions: the University of Southampton and Potsdam University to examine the intersections of environmental humanities, theorisation of weather as media, data practices and visualisations of weather. The underpinning concerns how to understand the different and at times conflicting registers of sensation of weather: as human experience and as scientific measurement, which both flow into storytelling about reality.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Ryan Bishop; Professor Dr. Jussi Parikka