Klimakonverter (climate converter) is an on-site and online installation based on a
convergence of the physical weather with dimensions of the perception of the
weather. Klimakonverter is an “imagery” of the conversion of systemic behavior into
a physical context of experience.

Considerations

“Imageries” are patterns of thinking derived from experience. (For example, if you
would suddenly find yourself in a state of weightlessness, you would initially behave
according to experience gained under conditions of gravitation. Such imageries
determined out of one’s own point of view of things (from a “central perspective”)
can be contrasted to auditory imageries. These are based on physically motionless
perception of acoustic events that, through their behavior, depict time and
space (hearing the behavior of things from a “spectral perspective”).

Thus, auditory imageries can be interfaces that make immediate physical experience
with systems into tools of encounter with systemic behavior. (Klimakonverter is based
on the creation of auditory imageries out of the convergence of certain classes of
weather data.) Imageries that lead to systemic thinking have political implications:
global processes are indeed rhetorically “recognized” as systemic, but the isolated
obser-vation of one of their states nevertheless ultimately tempts those doing so to
again interpret these processes as “causal.”

In order to be able to order, compare and control […] our experience of
things, we [have] projected the diversity of existence onto a few possible
states of a simple, easy-to-manage system.

Such systems are a systematic distortion of the capacity to understand. Inherent
in precisely this economic simplification (of thinking) is the danger of political populism.
In the process of civilization, climatic zones have established the basis of
political-territorial interests. Nowadays, weather data and forecasts are vital information
above all in agrarian cultures and extreme climatic zones. On the other hand,
in contemporary Western society obsessed with the collection of experiences, weather
information possesses value primarily for recreational activities, “talking about
the weather” has just a social function.

Realization

Klimakonverter juxtaposes these dimensions of the weather to one another. On-site,
both objective data about the weather as well as the subjective data that results after
processing by and presentation in the mass media are “converted” into a sensory
experiential context. The objective data and sonograms of the moderation of worldwide
TV weather shows are visualized and translated into an artificial climate; the
“talk-ing about the weather” is initiated as a way of playing with the installation. This
gives rise to an auditory imagery made up of humidity, light, temperature, wind, etc.,
the “livability” of which is indicated by the thriving or dying of plants.

Translated from the German by Mel Greenwald