54. Meteorological Reliquary

For this month's newsletter, clouds, condensation, how we track storms, how we measure their force, how we chase them, moments of beauty and disaster, and how we channel those forces into ourselves.

Hello friends,

If you've been following the crazy weather events we've been having here in New York, it should come as no surprise that the sky has been on my mind this month. Between the suffocating smog, sudden dumps of rain, oscillations in temperature, and sticky blankets of humidity, it's been hard to escape the weight of atmospheric pressure (or the painful blush of an impending sunburn) even when clouds part and everything becomes blue and beaming again.

So for this month's newsletter, clouds, condensation, how we track storms, how we measure their force, how we chase them, moments of beauty and disaster, and how we channel those forces into ourselves.

TOUCH

I first became fascinated by Elorea when I listened to Smell Ya Later's interview with the founders back in 2022, and I've loved watching the brand flourish ever since. They recently opened their first physical store, so my friend and I decided to sign up for the in-person sensory experience. This included scent strips with their complete line of fragrances and a selection of artisanal chocolates designed to compliment each set of notes. It's not every day that I get to eat and smell my way through a perfume line, and it was so fun revisiting my previous faves alongside their newest additions. These blends of florals, fruits, sweet, and savory were an absolute delight, pairing especially perfectly with their core Elements collection. I fell back in love with Heaven, and picked up a travel size of Earth to accompany me on my upcoming vacation.

Do you ever got to a show at a museum and find yourself thinking about it ever since? That's how I (still) feel about the Folk Art Museum's exhibition American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds. I saw this show back in 2021, but the sculptural beauty of these pieces have stuck with me to this day. While traditional weather vanes are no longer a part of our lives, they were once bold pieces of practical kinetic public artwork, and fascinating indicators of wealth, class, and cultural developments in rural America, especially from the 18th to 20th century. I loved how this exhibition displayed these objects as works of art and historic pieces of design, and that they chose to keep them in various degrees of rust, reflective of the weather they endured.

Lesley Harrison's first poetry collection, Blue Pearl, turns the chilling northern air of places like Iceland, Svalbard, Scotland, and Greenland into a sonic muse, historic protagonist, and meteorological agent of poetics. As you read her verses, you can feel delicate latticework of ice crackle under your feet and razor sharp gusts of wind chill you. Yet even as we move through these harsh topographies on land and in the tumultuous sea, Harrison reveals a mythic beauty to these scenes of stormy grayness.

LOOK

Irma, 2022

June marks the beginning of hurricane season, and it immediately brought to mind Nate Lowman's series of storm paintings. Usually taking the form of moving heatmap graphics on our TV screens, Lowman freezes these disastrous weather events in time, drawing our attention to the unintentional beauty of their saturated satellite imagery and the violence lurking behind their flat rendering. As he noted in a 2017 interview with Vice, "“[A storm graphic] means devastation is imminent, and then when it’s over it becomes a signifier of a historical moment. A hurricane did what it did.”

Before encountering Kim Abeles's Smog Collectors, I had no idea that the term 'smog' had only been part of our lexicon since 1905. Comprised of several groups of objects made with different mediums, Smog Collectors doesn't just reflect on past histories of pollution, but rather takes up these toxic particulates as the material that brings these artworks to life. My personal favorites are her Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates from 1992. To create these, Abeles left the plates on the roof of her Los Angeles studio to accumulate dust in the shape of each president's portrait. The duration of the smog exposure was based on their environmental policy records. While we might occasionally see smog as a haze blurring the skyline, Abeles's project renders this mostly-invisible hazard into markers of American environmentalist history.

Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube is a dynamic sculpture that merges Haacke’s conceptual interest in systems with scientific processes of transformation. The Plexiglass structure, which is filled with a little bit of distilled water, is designed to be sealed off. In doing so, it creates a kind of micro-climate as the water evaporates, condensates, and gradually drips back down to the bottom, fluctuating based on the ambient gallery temperature. In doing more research about this piece, I came a catalog essay from MIT’s List Visual Arts Center that reflects on the immense labor and thinking that goes into building and maintaining this seemingly simple structure.

In 2012, Tatu Gustafson embarked on his Weather Camera Self-Portrait series where he began to photograph himself using roadside weather cameras scattered throughout Finland. The country currently uses these cameras to take photos for the Finnish Transport Agency, and Gustaffson’s intervention turns this benign government technological tool into an experimental site for self-representation. In a time when these kinds of processes are automated, fed into various newsfeeds and databases, I love how these photos throw you off guard, even unsettle you a little bit, as Gustafsson stands by himself on these highways throughout every season.

LISTEN

In 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia triggered an event later known as “The Year Without Summer.” This episode of Imaginary Worlds doesn’t just break down the impacts this volcano eruption had on climate systems around the world. It also explores how this change in weather patterns gave birth to the Gothic genre as Mary Shelley found herself caught up in a life of scandal and (literal) darkness.

Eartheater’s 2019 album Trinity creeps in like a summertime storm. Dreamy synths enhance her breathy vocals with atmospheric rhythms. Tracks like “High Tide” and “Supersoaker” evoke flooding and erotic catacalysm while “Preservation” chills you with her icy lyricism. My favorite tune is the one that closes out the album, “Solid Liquid Gas.” This force of nature of a song sends you into the stratosphere with lightning-sharp lyrics and transcendent thundering sounds of ethereal apocalypse.  

LICK

Data visualization has a special place in my heart, so I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shoutout to two of my favorite websites that track and portray the weather here in NYC and around the country. The first is Weather Gradient, which gives you the forecast for any zip code in the United States and depicts factors like temperature, wind, and humidity through color-changing graphics. The second is the visually-satisfying NSKYC, created by Mike Bodge. This site generates the average color of the New York sky every 5 minutes and posts them with a hex code and a screenshot of the Manhattan skyline from a local weather camera. Although these two sites depict different kinds of weather information, I love how they spice up the weather report.

Solar Protocol takes an unusually brilliant approach to website hosting, digital autonomy, and renewable energy. The website is maintained across a number of solar-powered servers across the world, and it bounces from whichever host has the most sunshine. This project takes a slower approach to navigating cyberspace, one that’s more in tune with changes across our IRL weather network. In a time when we’re grappling with our unlimited energy consumption, Solar Protocol’s network calls for the use of “natural rather than artificial intelligence. The network routes internet traffic according to the logic of the sun.” Sometimes the site will temporarily slow, shut down, or rest at night, enabling healthier and less extractivist computation.

Recently, the art world’s been buzzing with new revelations that air pollution might be the reason that Impressionist paintings look the way they do. The official study out of Harvard University posits that paintings by Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and J. M. W. Turner portrayed various hazes, smog, and cloud formations resulting from meteorological events in the period by comparing historical climate data with their works. Looking at the paintings again now, it might seem obvious, but for a long time many assumed that Impressionism’s stylistic strategy was more of a departure from realism rather than a depiction of what these artists saw when they painted en plein air. As someone thinking about art and environment, I’m fascinated.

I recently saw Katrina Babies, a documentary created by survivor Edward Buckles Jr. I still remember those images of flooded-out streets, people trying to call for help from rooftops, and racist accusations of looting as New Orleans’s Black community was left to fend in the days after the hurricane. Buckles’s film follows the lives of the children who evacuated or got trapped in the city, the ways their families and communities fractured, and how they’ve suffered with their trauma in silence for nearly two decades. Katrina was a devastating event that altered the lives of so many young people forever, yet Buckles’s profound study of generational trauma reminds us that for those most impacted, recovery from the storm is far from over. 

CLICK

As I was planning this newsletter, I thought back to artist Tomás Saraceno’s notion of the “Aeroscene” to describe the state of our world. In a time when terms like “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” and even “Chuthulucene” get thrown around in attempts to articulate humanity’s impact on the planet, I love how Saraceno’s approach takes a more atmospheric approach. As Saraceno writes in a chapter for Art in the Anthropocene, that “it is an invitation to think of new ways to move and sense the circulation of energy.” Saraceno’s vision takes the form of floating monumental and portable sculptures—built collaboratively with communities around the world—that enables us to re-examine “the inscribed notions of property and properties, human and inhuman, production and subjection…to form a different reciprocal alliance with the elements capable of restoring the air to a commonwealth of life.”

Melanie Braverman’s poem “I used to love the run-up to a storm” captures that moment when something shifts in the air and everything becomes electric as everyone braces themselves. I’ve personally never experienced the tornado Braverman did, but I love the way she situates you, sitting beside her mother with that childlike wonder watching her family panic and prepare. She writes: “We’ve just spent a week like this, my mother perched in a chair above the water keeping watch for the next bad thing.”

I’m still mourning the loss of Real Life, but I did want to include one of my favorite pieces to come out of the magazine by Lachlan Summers. Titled “Naming Storms,” Summers considers how giving titles to extreme weather events uproot and decontextualize them from the ongoing global climate crisis. As someone who grew up with NOAA’s annual list of hurricane season names, I’d never given this much thought, but I really appreciate how Summers connects this phenomenon to issues of gender, colonial histories, and systemic inaction on climate change. He writes: “The disaster, the storm, the fire, the earthquake, the virus, is just an inflection point upon deep histories of creating and maintaining human difference. The name of any disaster refers to a harrowing divergence of impacts, experiences, and outcomes, belying attempts at summary. How can we talk about processes that refuse a name?”