Talking About the Weather
Sunday, July 9th, 2006
“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 exploring our own 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’. The weather, once a safe way for strangers to connect, is now fraught with an edge of danger as ominous signs of global warming multiply. In this project weathertalk is no longer a banal exchange of local weather forecasts, 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.
This is an ongoing project where we are collecting breath as widely as possible. For more info go to our collaborative blog called Talking About the Weather where we invite you to donate TEXT breath - describe the breath you are taking right now, especially with reference to the weather that is conditioning it.
Talking about the Weather involves performative encounters, where we perform two Australian visitors 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.