Strange Weather

*The Studio for Urban Projects received the Grand Prize in the Eco-Visualization category of Eyebeam’s Eco-Vis challenge for Strange Weather.

Language is constantly shifting to capture changing popular thought.  How is our growing understanding of global climate change—as a scientific, political and cultural phenomenon—reflected in our everyday language?

The Studio for Urban Projects believes that the way we think about nature is critical to how we perceive our role within the environment and address problems–such as the imminent crisis of global warming.

The current popular focus on climate change is projected as a new and contemporary event, yet the “natural greenhouse effect” was first described by physicist John Tyndall in 1859; the relation between CO2 levels and earth’s temperature by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. It is only in recent years that popular culture has caught up with scientific discourse and embraced climate change as an all too real phenomenon. Today the daily weather forecast takes on a foreboding quality as we begin to understand how our everyday actions impact global climate in potentially irreversible ways.

Strange Weather graphs the usage patterns of terms that characterize the dialog around climate change from Internet news sources. These terms, including “carbon footprint,” “greenhouse gasses,” and “polar icecap,” are juxtaposed with the mundane daily audio stream of New York City weather information broadcast by the National Weather Service. Strange Weather aims to provoke us to think about how our perception of weather must change from an objective measure of natural phenomena to something that complexly and darkly also mirrors ourselves.

Strange Weather was created in collaboration with Gilbert Guerrero, Christian Nold, and Rick and Megan. We are grateful for the support of Eyebeam and the 2007 Eco-Vis Challenge.