BLUE SKY, GREEN SCREEN
lecture performance with Nóra BARNATrafó Stúdió, Budapest, 2024
Why do we still need human mediation despite increasingly sophisticated forecasting models and digital technologies? What role do human perception and knowledge play in making forecasts? Is it possible to imagine prognostics without human intervention? How relevant are everyday weather observations in the context of climate change?
During the research residency of Workshop Foundation in Budapest, we explored the connections and expressive possibilities of meteorology, multimedia, movement and embodied technology.
Music: Barnabás TÓTH
Special thanks to Workshop Foundation and András László NAGY
Photos by Dániel GAÁL
We examined how atmospheric phenomena and forecasting technologies function as both medium and metaphor, shaping our perception of uncertainty and control in everyday life as well as in the context of the ecological crisis. We investigated performative spaces in which the physical body – the subject itself – served as the primary measuring tool. The physical space transformed into a living weather map and a wind tunnel is recontextualized as a sovereign space.
By engaging weather as a material condition and a cultural construct, we sought to create a dialogue between intuitive artistic experimentation and processes of scientific knowledge production. Measurement is never entirely neutral or disembodied.
During WWI, Lewis Fry Richardson developed the first mathematical weather forecasting model. Lacking electronic computers, he envisioned a massive "forecasting factory" where tens of thousands of people would continuously calculate regional weather equations in real time. Our performance project revives and reimagines Richardson's utopian vision, shifting it from mathematical computation to collective somatic experience.
Through structured scores, forecasting is translated into spatial movement. Participants trace self-generated atmospheric curves, translating thoughts into tangible, physical trajectories. It is an exercise in collective listening and collective mapping, where uninitiated performers engage in a shared cartography of the present moment – observing sudden encounters and the rhythm of their own movements.
Weather Machine
video 8’12”
Two figures stand within the wind tunnel, enacting the gesture of measurement. The human body – ordinarily subject to air, turbulence, and instability – is here subsumed into the system of quantification, becoming both instrument and subject of its own calibration. Dwarfed by the monumental apparatus, the figures hold obsolete devices, their insistence on control where control is unattainable evoking broader cultural anxieties: the relentless accumulation of data, the fetishization of measurement, and the persistent illusion of mastery over nature in spite of our fundamental fragility within it.
Wearing lab coats stages “science” as a costume and performance, rather than a purely rational pursuit. The lab becomes a theater of knowledge production. Standing still inside the machine – rather than operating it – exposes the performativity of measurement: that science is not only about precision but also about gestures, authority, and symbols.
video 8’12”
Two figures stand within the wind tunnel, enacting the gesture of measurement. The human body – ordinarily subject to air, turbulence, and instability – is here subsumed into the system of quantification, becoming both instrument and subject of its own calibration. Dwarfed by the monumental apparatus, the figures hold obsolete devices, their insistence on control where control is unattainable evoking broader cultural anxieties: the relentless accumulation of data, the fetishization of measurement, and the persistent illusion of mastery over nature in spite of our fundamental fragility within it.
Wearing lab coats stages “science” as a costume and performance, rather than a purely rational pursuit. The lab becomes a theater of knowledge production. Standing still inside the machine – rather than operating it – exposes the performativity of measurement: that science is not only about precision but also about gestures, authority, and symbols.
As part of the research project Blue Sky, Green Screen with Nóra BARNA
Special thanks to the Theodore von Kármán Wind Tunnel Laboratory, Department of Fluid Mechanics (BME), Budapest, Hungary
Special thanks to the Theodore von Kármán Wind Tunnel Laboratory, Department of Fluid Mechanics (BME), Budapest, Hungary
Based in Budapest, Hungary.