Weather Reports – Wind as Model, Media, and Experience
Final Report Abstract
Wind is an aesthetic entity, both perceptible and measurable. Since the late 19th century, wind has been modelled in the form of scientific data that explored its force in various configurations - from wind tunnels to aerodynamic design. At the same time, storms and winds persist as a deeply experienced and poetic sensation: from the extensive cultural history of wind in literature and the arts to the equally rich history of wind gods in indigenous mythology. We focus on the modern media-cultural context of wind, as it is contextualized in relation to contemporary climate, earth, and ocean sciences, and its various aesthetic meanings. From this point, we propose a new theorization of wind as an elemental medium, as media scholar John Durham Peters expressed with his hypothesis 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? We address this question through perception, cultural context, and the scientific modelling of wind to connect various perspectives that mediate between embodied experience, data practices, and aesthetic production. This triangulation is necessary as wind, like most climate factors, can only be explored indirectly. We use this intentionally broad perspective on the phenomenon of wind in collaboration between two major research institutions, the University of Southampton and the University of Potsdam, to investigate the intersections of environmental humanities, the theorization of weather as a medium, data practices, and visualizations of wind. Through collaborative and interdisciplinary work approaches, we have created new insights into the perception of climate and climate change on both a theoretical and an aesthetic level. We did this, by, for instance, bringing together media scholars, data visualizers, artists, and atmospheric researchers in the emerging field of environmental humanities within the framework of a new workshop format, the Environmental Data Hackathon. Furthermore, our findings have been disseminated through articles, a special issue, commissioned artistic works, an exhibition, and a conference. By encompassing data practice and scientific modelling, literature and information systems, as well as artistic and curatorial practice, the project has captured the epistemological implications of wind as force and medium and its inescapable significance for understanding and experiencing the climate crisis. "Weather Reports" concerned the question of how the different and sometimes contradictory registers of weather perception are to be understood: as human experience as well as scientific measurement, both of which flow into the storytelling of reality.
Publications
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Wind Humanities: An Elemental Media Approach. Media+Environment, 6(2).
Hepach, Maximilian; Bishop, Ryan; Carpenter, J. R.; Parikka, Jussi & Schneider, Birgit
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Elementare Medien. Stoffe, Theorien, Methoden, Bielefeld: Transcript 2025
Hepach, Maximilian & Birgit Schneider (Eds.)
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Reading Wind Diffractively: Elemental Chiasmus as Theory and Method. Media+Environment, 7(1).
Hepach, Maximilian Gregor & Schneider, Birgit
