Art Metropole

#16132

PUBLIC 70: The Weather

Editor

Joel Ong

Date

2024

Publisher

Public Journal

Format

Periodicals

ISBN

0845-4450

Size

7.5 × 9.5 inches

Length

196 pp

Genre

Canadian, Criticism

The weather palpably shapes our daily lives in ways that are at once subtle and profound. A multitude of tiny atmospheric, terrestrial, and oceanic variations, within our collective experience of the weather lies a rich and equally diverse range ofnotions, practices, and knowledge of the environment and our envelopment within it. This issue of PUBLIC investigates the cultural, literary, and engineered histories of the weather, focusing not only on the felt effects of climate collapse but also on how various modalities in sensory studies, Indigenous wisdom, and embodied practices are highlighting our changing relationship with the atmosphere. Amidst the urgency of anthropogenic climate change, the growing realization of our deep entanglement with the environment has brought new significance in the sensory aesthetics of the weather to a technocratic milieu teeming with networks of new gadgetry and prediction machines. Increasingly, the non-site of the atmosphere is being materialized, politicized, and visualized with aerial sensors, electromagnetic signalling, and all manner of organic and inorganic compounds that infiltrate our macro- and microbiomes. How might we build on Indigenous and alternative cultural histories of elemental media as well as the emerging aesthetics of meteorological art to develop a new vocabulary for understanding the weather?