Public - Volume 35, Issue 70, 2024

Clouds are a main source of uncertainty in climate change. Clouds cast shadows as they pass, shadows which are, perhaps, a metaphor for what is (or can be) known and what is not (or cannot be). Scientists study clouds, the forest, and weather—and make images of them in the process—to understand how climate change may affect them in the future. And they must: they need better models for weather prediction to address our cloud- (or climate-) scale uncertainty. However, landscapes, and weather, defy representation. So, when do images help find certainty within uncertainty, and when do they prolong or maintain it? For me, as an artist, images keep questions open as much as they answer them. Even an image made as an answer can hold innumerable other answers and questions—not as a tool to dispute facts but to magnify potential, and to open up space for thought.

Tackling the question of cloud seeding from an environmental and legal point of view provides a plethora of challenges involving international law and sovereign state interests. For Catalan artist Maxime Berthou, the creation of Paparuda.cloud is a form of answer, involving community involvement through blockchain mechanisms and Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAO), creating tools for concerned individuals to shape the question through community-driven financial instruments.

Germaine Koh’s extended artist statement documents her weather- and climate-related works. She summarizes her body of work that adapts commonplace objects and technologies to suggest connections between human activities to naural and built environments, especially by introducing environmental forces into unexpected situations such as building interiors and domestic settings. These include the Fair-weather forces series of interventions that control architectural elements in relation to weather conditions, and process-based works that engage geological time. These works are provisional and continually changing, and they provoke reflection and reckoning and a sense of awe in face of our connections to the greater-than-human, but also remind us of human agency and responsibility within these. Koh suggests that the hand-made character grounds these works. She proposes to speak of the Systemic sublime, a variant of the sublime which acknowledges human implication in systems which exceed our comprehension.

The series of collages created for this issue combines satellite images of the Interior of British Columbia (Sentinel-2 images via Planet Labs) with data visualizations representing land use and agricultural production on a global scale. The collages contrast the optical space of satellite imagery with modernist approaches to form, as disparate aspects of mapping technique. A descriptive text accompanying the series outlines historical context for the process of mapping through aerial surveys in Canada.

The poem was inspired by the historical work and observations of Sydney Hart’s essay, “On Comparisons in Map Art” and Jacqueline Jenkins and Mél Hogan’s work in “An Archive of Suffering: Hunger Stones and the Necropoetics of Climate Crisis,” both of which also appear in this issue.

A Machine to Listen to the Sky: Transducing Space Weather delves into the intersection of art, science, and technology by capturing electromagnetic signals from natural and man-made sources. Using custom-built Very Low Frequency (VLF) antennas, Tapper explores the invisible soundscape created by space weather and terrestrial activity, including solar radiation lightning, and power grids. His work investigates how these signals interact with the Earth’s ionosphere, transforming scientific phenomena into artworks disseminated through workshops, installations, and field recordings.

An exhibition review of Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre at Centre Phi, Montreal which considers the activist intent of the work. The 74-minute film represents human-scale, microscopic scale, and macroscopic scale sequences, including black-and-white solarized footage and multi-spectral drone imagery, to depict the devastation of the Amazon rainforest. While praised for its innovation, critics have argued the work risks aestheticizing suffering and diluting engagement with geopolitical issues. Mosse platforms Indigenous voices who urge viewers to act against the Amazon’s exploitation, but questions remain about art’s ability to motivate tangible political action.

Curated by Dallas Fellini at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances featured works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Lucas LaRochelle, Joshua Schwebel, Chelsea Thompto, and Lan “Florence” Yee that explore the slippery and shrouded frameworks of illegibility, opacity, and invisibility. Through sculpture, photography, video, sound and performance, these artists challenge simplistic trans representation and trouble trans hypervisibility, turning toward the productive potentiality of opacity and archival illegibility. Taken together, their works explore invisibility as an act of self-protection and form of political agency for queer and trans individuals and connect the social and environmental demands for visibility.

This review of Words of Weather: A Glossary, edited by Jussi Parikka and Daphne Dragona, discusses the volume’s underlying themes of materiality of weather, problems of human exceptionalism, and posthuman responses to living in a climatically precarious world by contextualizing its exploration of unique and often unexpected terms.