Scrawled across the walls, noted down in shaky handwritten lines, and etched into stone are glyphs that presage an impending change in weather. These markings are sometimes a reflection of immediate conditions or a portent of distant futures of tumultuous seas, droughts or prolonged rainy seasons.
Text and glyphs by Benjamin McMillan
1. Lorenzo Lotto, Family Portrait, 1524. Courtesy Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
1. Lorenzo Lotto, Family Portrait, 1524. Courtesy Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
In the year 2094, the turbulent climate has wrought an end to technology and electronic forecasting. In the face of this meteorological flux, and no longer able to rely on a computer program to analyse every change in the sky, forecasters now read the world themselves. Having honed their craft by studying ancient texts about the sky, water and earth, and observing subtle changes in animal and plant life, they mark each of their observations with a glyph. Bundled up, glyphs become tracings, readings of weather to come.
1. Lorenzo Lotto, Family Portrait, 1524. Courtesy Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
These tracings, and the script of which they are constructed, are logographic, meaning that each symbol represents one observation and one thing. This could be a type of cloud, the behaviour of an animal or the colour of a leaf. Symbols can then be combined to create new meanings. The simplest example could be the glyph for cold matched with the glyph for water, making ice. Ice could then be paired with sky, making hail, or with ground, making frost.
Along with these pragmatic symbols come glyphs that express wisdom passed down from generation to generation. When the moon is darkest near the horizon, expect rain, or trees produce more berries than usual when an extra cold winter is approaching. In a future world with an unstable climate, a deep understanding of these small details could be the difference between surviving and perishing. The glyphs and their many combinations are an expression of how a tech-less world could keep up with the many permutations of a changeable climate.
Along with these pragmatic symbols come glyphs that express wisdom passed down from generation to generation. When the moon is darkest near the horizon, expect rain, or trees produce more berries than usual when an extra cold winter is approaching. In a future world with an unstable climate, a deep understanding of these small details could be the difference between surviving and perishing. The glyphs and their many combinations are an expression of how a tech-less world could keep up with the many permutations of a changeable climate.
1. Lorenzo Lotto, Family Portrait, 1524. Courtesy Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
This weather notation system is part of artist Femke Herregraven’s work Wet Spells, commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary for the exhibition ‘Our Silver City, 2094’. In the exhibition, which premises a world that has been reshaped by decades of crisis and collapse, resource wars, evacuations, plastic-eating bacteria, the collapse of high technology, and catastrophic changes in weather, Wet Spells proposed an immersive site-specific anachronistic weather lab that takes ancient weather lore and local indigenous weather knowledge as its starting point.
