Through the coupled forms of the essay and the art object, this Open Project engages recent shifts in weather forecasting: its infrastructure, models, and material registration—as a contested apparatus that both observes and produces conditions of crisis across economic, social, cultural, and ecological domains from which it emerged.
The project describes the formation of the public weather forecast and its capture by private interests. Private capital's entrenchment in the forecasting space is driven by recent technical shifts in weather modeling that favor compute-heavy AI-methods over physics-based models, as well as a long-running effort to defund aspects of the public forecasting stack through a history of rent seeking behavior. What emerges is a privatized forecast that further produces a kind of temporal asymmetry, exploitable across short and long time horizons: in energy markets, the high-frequency trading of weather-exposed assets, regional insurance markets, and other forms of climate redlining.
This version of the forecast foregrounds financialized understandings of time and a longstanding desire for absolute control of environmental media, each perspective registering as material traces in the landscape. As the private forecasting stack emerges, these anxieties around uncertainty are more active than ever in proposals for digital twins, large scale atmospheric interventions, and other infrastructures of environmental control. The structure of the project references the form of the almanac as a situated mode of speculation which explores how models are coproductive with the world and posits that other models of relating to uncertainty are both possible and necessary.
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