Experiential Climate Models
From the weather outside to our internal awareness of our own bodies, our encounters with the world are increasingly mediated by scientific models. Models are where theories about how the world works make contact with empirical data. They narrow our focus and tell us what to pay attention to, enable us to comprehend the world at different scales than we would normally have access to, and to conduct experiments that would be impossible or unacceptable to conduct in the real world. How close are the models to our experience? Can we reconcile what climate models tell us with what we learn through our own senses? Do we have good reason to trust the models when what they suggest is counter-intuitive, unimaginable, or frightening? What would it feel like to be inside a climate model?
The Experiential Climate Models aims to enhance and transform climate modeling practices by creating responsive media environments in which it is possible to experience of vast and complex atmospheric phenomena at an embodied human scale.
Protoype: iMonsoon
As our protoype project, we are building a responsive media environment that allows the visitor to play the role of a storm system moving across the state of Arizona. As the storm moves through the space, the visitor will experience visual and auditory stimuli correlated to the effects that topographical conditions have on the movement of the weather system. For instance, we can represent the way the lift of clouds over mountains tends to lead to precipitation by programming the system to simulate rain conditions when a person in our space raises themselves up over an obstacle on the floor, which maps to the process of physically lifting oneself up to the scientific abstraction of orthographic lift.
The Experiential Climate Models aims to enhance and transform climate modeling practices by creating responsive media environments in which it is possible to experience of vast and complex atmospheric phenomena at an embodied human scale.
Protoype: iMonsoon
As our protoype project, we are building a responsive media environment that allows the visitor to play the role of a storm system moving across the state of Arizona. As the storm moves through the space, the visitor will experience visual and auditory stimuli correlated to the effects that topographical conditions have on the movement of the weather system. For instance, we can represent the way the lift of clouds over mountains tends to lead to precipitation by programming the system to simulate rain conditions when a person in our space raises themselves up over an obstacle on the floor, which maps to the process of physically lifting oneself up to the scientific abstraction of orthographic lift.