Project Description :: Photos :: Talking About the Weather blog :: UTS Gallery Show : : Out-of-Sync : : SCANZ : :
About the Project:
"The air you just exhaled has already spread far and wide. The CO2 from
a breath last week may now be feeding a plant on a distant continent,
or plankton in a frozen sea. In a matter of months all of the CO2 you
just exhaled will have dispersed around the planet."
Tim
Flannery, The Weather Makers
Talking About the Weather is an ongoing cross media project sparked by our response to the terrifying spectre of global climate change. Sheer terror at the possibilities that are being talked about led us to talking about the weather. In this project weathertalk is no longer a banal exchange of local weather conditions, but instead we ask people to donate their breath - the breath which they would normally use to talk about the weather and the same breath that is spread far and wide as described by Tim Flannery. Working with breath emphasises the dynamic nature of the atmosphere and our part in its creation and destruction. As Tim Flannery says, every breath you take makes you part of a dynamic system called the atmosphere, or the aerial ocean.
Talking about the Weather involves performative encounters, where we perform two Australian visitors to a foreign place asking for donations to our breath collection (to be the largest in the world) with which we will blow back global warming. These performative encounters continue our work with the ’pataphysical mode of an imaginary solution for an actual problem… in this case – global warming. The work is process oriented involving both the encounters themselves as well as sound and video documenting of the encounters. It plays with the form of various documentary methods – working between documentary and documentation.
As part of this project we have amassed a vast archive of video documenting the encounters as well as the world’s largest collection of breath. In the installation we present a selection of the collection and the archive.
The blog is an ongoing part of the project where we ask people to contribute
to our breath collection through posting a text which describes their
breath. On the blog site you can access samples of the video documentation
as well as samples of the audio breath collection. (coming shortly)
http://www.scanz.net.nz/weathertalk/
Who we are: Out-of-Sync is a collaboration between
Australian media artists Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda.
Acknowledgements and a very warm Thank-you to all the residencies that have sustained us during this project.
The project was made possible by the generous support of The MacDowell Colony, NH, Toos Neger art residency Dordrecht, The Netherlands and SCANZ new media residency, New Zealand.
For more info see our website: http://www.out-of-sync.com