User:Amy Suo Wu/updated project proposalII

Reclaiming uncertainty with irrational methods.

what

• Reversal of the statement “the weather affects your mood” to “your mood affects the weather”.
• Correlate emotional changes to the weather prediction.
• Active "laboratory" setting. Consultations will be given in the form of interview and video recordings will be made accordingly. This will then be analysised to make the prediction in it's upcoming days. Simultaneously, this set-up will function as a space for 'live' documentary making.

how

• For the graduation show, at least nominally, I would like to have an autonomous, mobile space parked outside of Tent on the Witte de With Straat. I am thinking of renting or buying a second hand caravan, mobile home, construction trailer or any portable means of facilitating a consultation set up (refer to blade runner scene: Voight-Kampff test to check the emotional levels of the replicant Leon).
• Process will include asking a set of questions that will hopefully reveal mistakes, involuntary gestures, unconscious slip-ups. I would like to capture this through video and render the vocal and facial 'glitches' through PD which will visualise the movements into a colour map resembling a weather map. In much the same way that weather maps chart temperature, pressure, wind direction, and wind speed, my facial maps will register facial movements. These parameters will then be associated to emotions.
• This footage in turn will be used to predict the weather while serving as footage for the documentary.

why

The notion of uncertainty is perhaps the least well understood concept in science. In the public parlance, uncertainty is a negative thing, implying a lack of rigor and predictability. In the field of meteorology, uncertainty is something that is to be contained so that it provides a measure of control over it. Similar to the stock market and population growth in ecology, the weather is a chaotic dynamic system which even though is deterministic, the highly sensitive nature of this system inherently evades the possibility of prediction. The irrational behavior of these systems even escape today's highly advanced computing technology and reasoning.

While Western science armed with rationalism may offer useful insights into phenomena, it is not clear that it will be able to explain everything. In thinking about it's limitations and blind spots of Western epistemology, I would like to create a space to contemplate and reflect upon causal factors that do not subscribe to a rational scientific paradigm. By changing the common proposition of weather affecting your mood to your mood affecting the weather, correlations between mood and weather are reversed. Thus, for my project I would like to somehow detect mood through some irrational means to predict the weather in the following days. The objective is not to compete with more official weather broadcasts, but rather to explore creatively an anyway speculative system outside any possible graspable container. On one hand I hope to address the more ambiguous and discredited influences of the unconscious spirit. On the other hand, by reclaiming uncertainty through this irrational method, I hope to shed light on the tenacity of a largely technologically driven society with the exclusive teleology of progress to dominate and its following consequences. Katherine Hayles maintains that, "visions of the future, especially in technologically advanced eras, can dramatically affect present developments.”