Weather as Material: Artists Who Halt Rain, Manufacture Clouds, and Set the Sky Adrift

The cooling tower of a decommissioned thermal power station. A concrete cylinder rises as if gazing at the sky, its top opened to a dull gray light. Inside that hushed interior, a single cloud floats softly. A real cloud, gone in about ten seconds. Nimbus, the series Berndnaut Smilde has continued since 2010, raises a white cumulus once — in churches, chapels, abandoned factories, mansions, the ruins of air-raid shelters, interior spaces where clouds are not supposed to form — and preserves that moment as photograph and video. Smoke, humidification, room temperature, light, humidity. The conditions the studio arranges to generate a single cloud are no less precise than outdoor meteorology, and yet the finished cloud dissipates once and only once.

The work of making a cloud once and letting it vanish is too laborious to consume as a magic trick, and its body is too fleeting to leave as a photographic record. The interest Smilde himself states is directed at the very "whereabouts of a brief moment" in which the phenomenon of a cloud rises indoors — he has gone on tirelessly photographing "a cloud taking up space as matter, reflecting light, coming into being at a particular instant." This gesture of summoning a meteorological phenomenon as the "material" of the work is shared among a group of artists that contemporary art has quietly pioneered since the 2010s.

In the previous installment, this journal traced the lineage of programming in which signage — a screen running twenty-four hours — takes on the clock and the weather as its subject ("Weather and Clocks: Screens That Take On the Always-On"). That article was the lineage of the side on which the screen takes on the weather. Refik Anadol translates the wind data of Boston Logan Airport into LED; teamLab synchronizes a meadow in Higashiosaka with actual wind and rain. It is a movement in the direction in which the screen side incorporates the weather — an external source of updates — as an editing object.

This essay traces the inverse. Not the screen but the work side is taken on by the weather — a lineage in which the work does not come into being unless weather happens, in which the happening of weather is the work. Smilde's artificial clouds are only one of its pure forms. A room that halts rain overhead, a flock of a thousand drones drawing across the night sky, a balloon that floats to the edge of the stratosphere on solar heat alone, an LED sculpture in which data streaming in real time from a weather station placed in a village deep in the Amazon is converted into the traditional patterns of an Indigenous people, a rattan sculpture woven out of the barometric data of a hurricane. Tracing six artists (communities) in turn, the TENKEI editorial team wants to sort out the logic of these "works awaited within the weather."

Raising a Cloud Indoors — Berndnaut Smilde

Smilde was born in 1978 in Groningen, the Netherlands. He took a master's in fine art at the local Frank Mohr Institute (Hanze University) in 2005, and is now based in Amsterdam. Nimbus began in his lineage of work in 2010. The first trial was done in his own studio, relying on a single cheap smoke machine, a humidifier, and natural light. While the smoke drifts as particles in the air, droplets placed at the boundary of room temperature and humidity adhere to it, and a mass that can be read visually as a "cloud" comes into being for a short time — that was the experimental setup.

In 2012, TIME magazine selected the Nimbus series as one of its "Top 10 Inventions of the Year." This is not an art magazine's annual roundup but a list of technical inventions. The event of a procedure born in the context of art being recognized as engineeringly novel as "a technology for generating clouds indoors" tells, in brief, the character of Smilde's work. The act of making a cloud is, for him, a task spanning both expression and implementation, and the two cannot be separated.

As the series progressed, the very choice of venue became part of Nimbus's design. St. Anne's Church in Groningen, the former museum Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, the basement of the royal pottery workshop in Delft, an abandoned gas works, the stairwell of a mansion — all are interior spaces with strong architectural memory, where meteorological phenomena are not supposed to arise. Smilde carefully observes the venue's beams, columns, plastered walls, and the grid pattern of the floor, and designs at what altitude, at what size, and at what angle of light the cloud should rise. The cloud appears as a guest welcomed into that architecture once and only once, and departs ten seconds later.

This design decision has something in common with the concept of ma (間) this journal has long referenced. Ma is space/time that has been left open. The high ceilings of a church or chapel were originally designed as "space left open for the air." Smilde's cloud places the phenomenon of a cloud, as "staffage (tenkei)," into that open ma. It is a two-layered structure in which the meteorological phenomenon descends as staffage upon the ma the architecture has prepared.

Halting Rain Overhead — Random International

In October 2012, an exhibition no one had seen before appeared at The Curve of London's Barbican Centre. A dark room of a hundred square metres along its long side, with water falling ceaselessly from the ceiling. Visitors are made to wait some ten-odd minutes before the railing, then guided one at a time to the center of the room. The instant a visitor steps in, the rain overhead stops. Walk, and the zone of halted rain moves along with you. Stand still, and a circular dry region keeps hovering only above you. This was Random International's Rain Room (2012).

The mechanism is a combination of a grid of solenoid valves built into the ceiling and 3D tracking cameras that survey the whole space. The cameras grasp the visitor's outline and position in real time, and only the solenoid valves above that person close to block the rain. With several hundred judgments per second, the halted zone follows the person's movement. Wholly enveloped in the sound and smell of the falling rain, the visitor is not wet by that rain at all. Random International lists the materials thus — "water, injection-molded tiles, solenoid valves, pressure regulators, custom software, 3D tracking cameras, steel beams, water management system, grated floor."

After its premiere at the Barbican, Rain Room toured to MoMA in 2013, Shanghai's Yuz Museum in 2015, and LACMA from that year through 2017, and in May 2018 was permanently installed at the UAE's Sharjah Art Foundation. This version, which Random International calls "our first permanent installation," is housed within a pavilion designed by SpaceContinuum Design Studio, led by the architect Mona El Mousfy, in collaboration with Shape Architecture Practice + Research. Passing through a dark approach descending underground, you come out into a room where 2,500 litres of self-cleaning recycled water keeps falling — an integration of architecture × apparatus that could not be realized in the touring exhibitions. The double-layered inversion of rain falling in the Middle East, and only the visitor staying dry, pushes the apparatus's meaning into another context.

While Rain Room presents the phenomenon of rain as "something controllable," running beneath it is the very uncontrollability of rainfall as a source of updates. To halt the rain, the rain must first keep falling. For the solenoid-halted zone to come into being, around it the rain must keep falling. By the absence overhead, the visitor comes to know, as if backlit, the dense presence of the rain surrounding them. To apparatize weather is not to erase weather — rather, the work says, it is to summon weather itself more strongly.

A Flocking Night Sky — Studio Drift

The Amsterdam-based artist collective DRIFT (Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta) has, since presenting the spatial apparatus Flylight in 2007, gone on observing the "murmuration" that great flocks of European starlings draw across the dusk sky. In December 2017, they embedded more than a decade of accumulated biological research into three hundred Intel Shooting Star drones. This was Franchise Freedom, premiered over the coastline of Art Basel Miami Beach with the sponsorship of BMW.

The drone flock is not choreographed in advance. The algorithm updates each craft's position, distance to neighboring craft, heading, and acceleration several dozen times a second, and the form of the flock as a whole spontaneously recomposes. Gordijn and Nauta give several parameters to the flock's directionality, but they have publicly stated that the resulting movement of the flock cannot be fully predicted. Like a flock of birds, the swarm behaves as something exceeding "a collection of individuals."

The performance subsequently expanded over the IJ river in Amsterdam, Burning Man, the Nieuwe Kerk, New York's Central Park, Taipei, Seoul, and a dozen-odd other cities. The largest in scale was the performance over The Lake in Central Park on 21 October 2023, where the number of drones grew to a thousand. Realized through a joint cooperation of the Office of the Mayor of New York City, Therme US, Drone Stories, and Nova Sky Stories, that night was also the first drone-art performance ever held in Central Park.

Franchise Freedom sits in the lineage of "works taken on by the weather" in two senses. One is that the flocking algorithm itself is a distillation of the behavior by which starlings recompose the flock in response to actual wind and temperature. The algorithm does not directly reference the weather itself, but woven inextricably into it are observed starlings and observed daily weather.

The other is that, as a premise of performance, wind speed, temperature, rainfall, and visibility must meet operational thresholds — put plainly, the performance does not come off in bad weather. Let me quote DRIFT's own statement:

The work explores the nature of decision making within flora and fauna. We have been studying the natural flight patterns of starlings for over a decade and translated these patterns into the proprietary algorithm that drives the drones.

— Studio DRIFT — Franchise Freedomsource

Starlings form a flock in response to the dusk air's chill, humidity, the angle of the sun, and the presence of predators. Franchise Freedom extracts that behavior as data and then injects it into a new atmospheric layer — the night sky. The weather is involved in the work both as the algorithm's "source text" and as its "performance condition."

Floating on Solar Heat Alone — Tomás Saraceno and Aerocene

On 25 January 2020, over the Salinas Grandes salt flats in Jujuy Province, northern Argentina — a salt plain more than three thousand metres above sea level — a silver elliptical object quietly rose. No fossil fuels, batteries, lithium, solar panels, helium, or hydrogen — none used at all. The balloon's material is a single sheet of thin silver Mylar, and the air inside is warmed by sunlight and infrared radiation from the salt flat. On the balloon is written a sentence composed jointly with the local Indigenous community — "Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium." The pilot was the Argentine aviator Leticia Noemí Marquès. In a sixteen-minute flight, a distance of 667.85 metres, a maximum altitude of 272.1 metres above the surface. It rewrote thirty-two world records certified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) all at once.

The Aerocene project Saraceno has worked on for many years is a composite endeavor spanning sculpture, activism, research, software, and community. The starting point was 2012, born from dialogue with the meteorologists Lodovica Illari, Glenn Flierl, and Bill McKenna of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) during Saraceno's stay as a visiting artist at MIT. What was made first was not the balloon itself but the software for calculating where to fly the balloon — the Aerocene Float Predictor.

The Float Predictor, when you input a departure point and a desired altitude, draws on altitude-specific wind-speed forecasts up to sixteen days ahead and simulates the path the balloon would trace. The meteorological data is not the balloon's fuel — there is no fuel to begin with — but its control panel. By reading at what altitude and how the wind blows, and raising or lowering the balloon to that altitude, the pilot chooses the balloon's course. Weather is material, an object of calculation, and the ground of decision.

The flight at Salinas Grandes is the result of this calculation software, the salt flat's surface infrared radiation, that day's angle of the sun, the atmospheric stratification at that point, and a decade of collaboration with the Indigenous community all gathering at a single point. The thirty-two world records are, at the same time, a publicly recorded testimony to the salt-flat ecosystem threatened by lithium-mining plans.

Here lies one extreme of "works taken on by the weather." The balloon does not float at all without weather. It cannot fly on a night without surface radiant heat and sunlight. The sixteen-minute flight is the very time that day's Jujuy atmosphere allowed.

Translating a Village's Wind onto the Screen — Refik Anadol × Yawanawá

Into this essay, which has traced four "artists outside the screen" so far, I want to include just one work that holds a screen. It is a case that fully adopts the classic format of signage × weather data — running real-time values of wind and temperature on a large LED — and yet the condition of the work's coming into being is in the same place as the other four artists. Winds of Yawanawa (2023), a collaboration between Refik Anadol and the Yawanawá community of the Brazilian Amazon.

The Anadol studio has thematically pursued the LED visualization of meteorological data ever since Wind of Boston (2017–) and Bosphorus (2018–19), which this journal also treated in the previous installment ("Weather and Clocks: Screens That Take On the Always-On"). The former is a year's worth of wind data from Boston Logan International Airport; the latter, thirty days of radar data of the Marmara Sea surface observed by the Turkish State Meteorological Service. Both works came into being upon a modern observation system, such as airport infrastructure or a national meteorological agency.

Winds of Yawanawa recomposes that upstream. The origin of the data is a single weather station installed in Aldeia Sagrada (the sacred village), within the Amazon rainforest.

The mechanism is clear. The weather station at Aldeia Sagrada records wind speed, gusts, wind direction, temperature, humidity, and rainfall in real time. The data flows from the Amazon via satellite and cloud into the Anadol studio's algorithm and is synthesized with the vocabulary of traditional patterns extracted from the drawings of the young Yawanawá sisters Nawashahu and Mukashahu. The soundtrack uses traditional Yawanawá chants. The completed data sculpture, as three large LED works cycling once every eight minutes, was first shown on 13 July 2023 at Scorpios Encounters on the Greek island of Mykonos.

What I want to note is that the recomposition of the "origin" of the data recomposes the whole meaning of the work. The wind an airport radar captures is the state of the atmosphere that happened to be over that airport. To visualize it on LED is an operation of visualization, and does not question the relationship to the object of visualization itself. The wind the Aldeia Sagrada station captures, on the other hand, is the wind of a specific ecosystem where the Yawanawá community has lived for generations, exposed to the pressures of lithium mining and deforestation. For Anadol to make that wind into LED is, at once an operation of visualization, accompanied by a political decision over the very place where the observation equipment is installed — where to place the station, who holds the right to use that data.

The form of economic agreement corresponds to this. Anadol and the commissioner Impact One announced that they would wholly waive their own share of sales from the genesis-edition NFTs (1,000 pieces), building in a mechanism that passes all revenue to the Yawanawá-led Instituto Nixiwaka. The funds are allocated to sustainable infrastructure at Aldeia Sagrada and to educational programs at Nova Esperança. About three million US dollars are publicly reported to have ultimately been gathered.

This is an event that cannot be fully described by "agreement with the weather" alone. To anticipate the point this essay treats in its final section, this is a case in which, alongside "agreement with the weather," "agreement with the community that holds the weather" is built into the work's structure. When the technical lineage of converting wind onto the screen (Wind of Boston, Bosphorus) is recomposed all the way upstream to the data's origin and rights, signage weather art arrived here. Saraceno lifting the lithium-mining issue into the sky over the salt flat, and Anadol running the Amazon's wind onto LED, look on the surface like entirely different work, yet at the root of the decision they are connected.

Woven-In Weather — Nathalie Miebach

Finally, I want to name one artist who weaves data itself into matter — neither a screen nor outdoors. It is the work of Boston-based Nathalie Miebach.

Her practice starts from the grammar of basket weaving, an almost pre-industrial craft. Reed, cord, beads, wooden slats. She uses the very lattice that weaves a three-dimensional basket as a coordinate system for meteorological data. The time series of a hurricane's barometric pressure, the rise and fall of tides, rainfall, temperature, humidity. Each corresponds to the color of a cord, the position of a bead, the angle of a reed, the length of a slat. Each colored bead arrayed on the basket's surface represents some meteorological element at some observation point at some hour.

The singular point of Miebach's work is that the woven basket is at the same time a musical score. From the same dataset she raises a score painted in watercolor. The colored beads correspond to pitch, the length of the cord to duration. The completed score, through collaboration with the composers Riley Nicholson and Harrison Ponce, is actually performed by string quartets such as ETHEL. The three days of Hurricane Sandy come into being simultaneously in separate media — as basket, as score, and as quartet.

Miebach's work depends on neither LED nor the outdoors. It requires no power source. It does not move. And yet it sits in the same lineage as the five artists (communities) seen so far. Because it takes on, as the work's material, weather — a source of updates that can be observed but not owned. Smilde's cloud, Random International's rain, Studio Drift's flock, Saraceno's wind and solar radiation, the wind blowing through the Yawanawá village — and Miebach's woven hurricane. The medium differs in each, but in all of them the work does not come into being unless the weather comes.

Making "Something That May or May Not Come" the Material

I have traced six bodies of work so far. The media — an indoor cloud, rain in a dark room, a drone flock in the night sky, a balloon over a salt flat, an Amazon village and an LED sculpture, a basket and a score on a desk — are splendidly disparate. And yet the reason the TENKEI editorial team considers them to belong to the same lineage is a certain fundamental decision of practice the six works share.

To treat weather not as an object of reproduction but as uncontrollable material — that decision.

When signage weather art visualizes weather on a screen, the object is basically "information to be read." Wind speed twelve metres, precipitation five millimetres, temperature twenty-one degrees. These figures update, but the method of visualization is designed in advance. The four movements of Refik Anadol's Wind of Boston, treated by this journal in the previous installment, prepare a range of expression in advance, so that the day's wind may be strong or weak. That the weather "does not come" is not assumed. The LED is always running.

In the case of the work taken up here, this is inverted. The possibility that the weather does not come, or the possibility that one does not know how the weather will come, becomes the most important variable for the work's side. Smilde's cloud does not come into being if the studio's air is dry that day. Random International's rain does not fall if the water supply stops. DRIFT's flock — if a gust comes, the performance itself is canceled. Saraceno's Pacha — unless that day's Jujuy atmospheric stratification, the sun, and the salt flat's radiant heat are all in order, the sixteen minutes are not marked. Anadol × Yawanawá's LED keeps moving only so long as the Aldeia Sagrada station keeps sending data — and what becomes of the station is inseparable from how that village continues to exist hereafter. Miebach's basket comes into being because a certain summer's hurricane happened, because that summer's data reached her hands.

This is not a matter of exposing the work to risk. Rather, it is an editorial decision to build the very uncertainty of weather into the work's structure. The unreproducible once-ness, the unownable source of updates, the ethics of not owning — these resonate deeply with the concept of tenkei (点景) this journal has long referenced. The staffage in a landscape painting is a small, once-only presence that rises in the scenery. One cannot stand in the same place twice.

If the always-on nature of the signage medium made possible an editing in which the screen side takes on the clock and the weather as "ground," then the six bodies of work introduced here either hold no screen, have discarded the screen, or, while holding a screen, place upstream of it a collaborator who holds no screen. What they adopt is another programming principle that comes into being only when the weather visits the work. This the TENKEI editorial team would tentatively like to call "agreement with the weather." It is a way of being in which the artist does not own or control the weather but keeps the work's side ready to take on that weather when it happens.

The cases of Saraceno and Anadol × Yawanawá show that, beyond this, one more operating principle extends: "agreement with the community that holds the weather." It is easy to say that weather belongs to no one, but a specific weather station, a specific ecosystem, a specific salt flat may already be placed where an Indigenous community has lived for generations. To make the data observed there into a work is, at once a technical problem of visualization, and an editorial decision about how to design the distribution of the data's rights and revenue. Now that weather art is maturing both inside and outside the screen, this question can no longer be ignored.

Outlook — Outside the Screen, or Alongside the Screen

In the context of this journal, which sets signage × art as its subject, why line up artists who hold no screen? Let me leave the reason at the end.

First, I wanted to record that the work of sorting out the editing category kei:候 (Climate / Atmosphere) — the lineage that makes climate and season the condition of a work's coming into being — cannot be settled by treating only weather art on signage. Anadol's wind-data paintings and Smilde's indoor clouds are made of entirely different media on the surface, but what supports both is the common editorial decision that "the screen/matter is preceded by the weather." In the former it takes form on the LED side, in the latter on the smoke side.

Second, I want to leave the observation that recent signage-type media art has learned quite a lot, on the operational-design side, from these "agreement with the weather"–type works. The Sharjah permanent installation of Random International's Rain Room has, since 2018, accumulated "details of resident operation" that did not exist in the touring era — operation that partitions the room according to visitor numbers, protocols for stopping the water circulation during maintenance. These are almost the same kind of challenge that signage content operation faces — how to keep both audience and apparatus healthily operating over the long term. The kind of operational knowledge accumulated on the side of works that handle weather should become an asset directly transferable to signage × weather projects.

Third, as a subject the TENKEI editorial team wants to dig deeper into hereafter, I want to record what happens when any of these five artists is combined with a permanent screen like signage. For example, an implementation that projects the balloon trajectory the Saraceno Float Predictor forecasts in real time onto signage near the departure point can hardly be said to be widely implemented yet. When the lineage of works that materialize weather and the signage lineage that visualizes weather run simultaneously in one place, a new kind of staffage may appear in the city's scenery. This journal wants to await that moment.

Over the salt flat, during the sixteen minutes of the balloon's silence, Aerocene Pacha floated writing nothing. The balloon's silver surface reflected the sun, and the salt ground looked up at it from below. Those sixteen minutes were the very time the weather visited that place. As long as the weather visits, the lineage of works that take it on will continue.

Sources

1. fig.001Peacock Visuals,Berndnaut Smilde — Nimbus Powerstation (Vimeo)
2. fig.002NeueHouse,Berndnaut Smilde — Nimbus at NeueHouse (YouTube)
3. fig.003Rain Room by Random International (2012) — Vimeo(2012)
4. fig.004Studio DRIFT,Franchise Freedom — an Artwork by Studio Drift (Vimeo)
5. fig.005Franchise Freedom — Central Park (YouTube)(2023-10-21)
6. fig.006Studio Tomás Saraceno,Vuela con Aerocene Pacha — de Tomás Saraceno (YouTube)
7. fig.007Refik Anadol Studio / Yawanawá Community / Impact One,Winds of Yawanawa — Teaser (YouTube)(2023)
8. fig.008Nathalie Miebach — Art made of storms (TED, 2011)(2011-10-21)
9. fig.009Houston Center for Contemporary Craft,Nathalie Miebach — The Water Line (YouTube)
10. [10]Berndnaut Smilde — Biography
11. [11]Berndnaut Smilde — Wikipedia
12. [12]Random International — Rain Room (Studio page)
13. [13]Rain Room at Sharjah Art Foundation(2018-05)
14. [14]Sharjah Arts Foundation creates permanent home for the Rain Room in UAE — Dezeen(2019-11-19)
15. [15]Franchise Freedom — Studio DRIFT project page
16. [16]Franchise Freedom at New York Central Park — Studio DRIFT(2023-10-21)
17. [17]Aerocene — an open community
18. [18]Fly with Aerocene Pacha — Aerocene Foundation(2020-01-25)
19. [19]Aerocene solar balloon gains 32 world records in 16 minutes — FAI(2020)
20. [20]Aerocene Float Predictor — MIT CAST
21. [21]Tomás Saraceno — Studio
22. [22]Refik Anadol — Winds of Yawanawa (Studio page)
23. [23]Impact One — Winds of Yawanawa commission(2023)
24. [24]Refik Anadol collaborates with Brazil's Yawanawá people on Amazon rainforest data sculpture — designboom(2023-07-30)
25. [25]Winds of Yawanawá — Scorpios Stories(2023-07-13)
26. [26]Nathalie Miebach — Artist Statement
27. [27]Q&A: How do you weave data into art? — UVA Today
28. [28]TENKEI related article — Weather and Clocks: Screens That Take On the Always-On