Teasing NWTV: Generic Weather(s)

par Simone Fehlinger

When images represent, mediate and do realities, we need to critically reflect on our most common (Western) archives—about the way narratives have been invented and to whom and what they are mutually linked. With the design research project "New Weather TV", designer Simone Fehlinger specifically explores the images of the (mainstream) weather report by which we daily incorporate modern fictions, organizing our attitudes: fictions that evoke our environment as a calculable, predictable and thus controllable object. As part of the exhibition "À L'intérieur de la production" (curator Ernesto Oroza with the CyDRe), Simone Fehlinger proposes a video installation and lecture-performance in order to stage her design research on so-called probabilistic weather forecasting (collaboration with Météo-France). By enacting our current world as a (completely urbanized) generic space, the designer experiences a generic weather via the ambivalent figure of the grid as a design tool and style. Because beyond organizing the world in norms and dualisms, the grid also seems to overstep classifications in order to conceptualize a relational “generic object” (Ernesto Oroza and Gean Moreno). Designer Ernesto Oroza further mentions the "placeholder"—that black square in graphic design that occupies an image section in pre-printing files—as a way to formulate possibilities. Given that the container of our contemporary space is the green chroma key background, can we materialize weather (forecast) as a placeholder generating multiple scenarios—in order to stage the reality of uncertainty?

Video installation from May 10th to May 14th inside the show À L'intérieur de la production (curator Ernesto Oroza with the CyDRe).

Lecture performance(s):
— Friday 13th of May at 4 pm (in French) and at 5 pm (in English),
— Saturday 14th of May at 2 pm and 6pm (in French), at 3 pm and 7 pm (in English).

Part of th 12th Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne.

This work was supported by a state funded « Investments for the Future » program operated by the French National Research Agency (reference ANR-17-CONV-0004).

par Simone Fehlinger