Atmosphere of Rivers 

2023

Eight channel video installation, 3D animmation, mirrors, atmospheric water vapor data from the National Oceanic and Atmosphheric Administration: “8 minutes” 

“Universe and place are connected in a knot as difficult to form as to imagine” Michel Serres, The Five Senses, 2009

Atmosphere of Rivers is an inmersive video installation driven by data taken from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to measure atmospheric rivers that flow across the globe. Every day the Amazon Rainforest evaporates large amounts of water back to the atmosphere, influencing the formation of atmospheric rivers that affect floods and fires in California. The digital fabric responds to a data set of 30 years of water exchange between the Amazon Rainforest and California. As the magnitude of the water vapor travelling from the Amazon to California increases, the ddigital fabric tenses.  As the water travelling from the Amazon to California decreases, the digital fabric loosens.

Cnsequently, the fabric is proposed as the body that weaves interconnectedness between geographies, allowing for fluctuation of the atmospheric rivers to be seen and felt over time. Water flying across the globe becomes the force that animates the fabric of life, making emphasis that “animating” is bringing something to life.

The work seeks to blur the line between local and global, reflect on atmosphere as a collective membrane weaved by human and non-human activity, and acknowledge the poetry of having a biosphere that bounces water back and forth between its terrestrial and atmospheric boundaries resembling an infinite mirror.

Atmosphere of Rivers examines the “affective orientation in the gap between map and territory — or, as we would say today, between information and embodiment” proposed by Brian Holmes. How building situated knowledge and affective experiences creates the aesthetics and public space of the Anthropocene. A call not only to understand the phenomenons that enable life, but also a call to re-embody earth systems.