Cyclone.soc brings together two contemporary phenomena:

- severe weather, the project uses weather data that charts the emergence and progress of hurricanes.
- the polarized nature of debate that occurs in certain online newsgroup forums.

The project maps textual conversation taken from the political and religious newsgroups to the isobars of a dynamic, interactive weather visualization of hurricanes, whose complex structures are used to visualize the conversational churn and eddies of the newsgroup conversations.

In staging these interactions as a process of meteorological precipitation, newsgroup conversations “condense” in the working environment as a temporal ambient patterning—a structuring that acts not only as a metonym of difference, but of ideological tensions which mirror the dynamics of social space.

Cyclone.soc is a navigable environment that gives the user the ability to zoom in or out and skate across and through the cyclonic weather formations in order to read or be immersed in the newsgroup text.

The artists would like to thank the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for their support for this project