World Weather Network

The world's weather is not what it was. We see glaciers melting and sea levels rising. Some lands are flooded and others are parched. Everywhere is heating up. 

Formed in response to the climate emergency, the World Weather Network is a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts agencies around the world and an invitation to look, listen, learn, and act. 

From June 2022 to June 2023, artists, writers and their communities will share observations, stories, and reflections about their local weather, creating an archipelago of voices and viewpoints. These “weather reports” will take many different forms: poetry, fiction, reportage, video diaries, films, photography, podcasts and more, shared via a new online platform.

Engaging climate scientists and environmentalists alongside artists and writers, the World Weather Network brings together diverse world views and different ways of understanding the weather across multiple localities and languages.  

To find out more and to read, watch, listen and experience weather reports by artists and writers around the world, visit:

worldweathernetwork.org

To receive updates from the World Weather Network, subscribe to the newsletter.

Video: Your Weather Is Our Weather (2022). Thumbnail: Weather station at Enoura Observatory, Japan

Image: Children of the puppet theatre group of Gidree Bawlee. Photo: Gidree Bawlee.

Artangel’s London Weather Stations

In Artangel’s home city of London, two new commissions explore the ways in which everyday weather is experienced, defined and communicated in the context of two contrasting locations: the iconic Senate House Library and a flat shared by the artist Abi Palmer and two Siberian forest cats.

A Thousand Words for Weather is a multilingual “dictionary” conceived by Taiwanese-Canadian writer Jessica J. Lee, consisting of personal, affective weather words translated across ten different languages. The dictionary has been transformed into a sonic installation by the artist Claudia Molitor, creating a “weather system of words, data and sounds” at Senate House Library.

Artist Feifei Zhou and digital studio The Workers will reimagine the “dictionary” as a live and interactive weather report to be published via the World Weather Network in February 2023. 

Abi Palmer's World Weather Network project will be announced in early 2023.

Image: Outside Senate House Library, London for A Thousand Words for Weather, 2022. Photograph: Francesco Russo.

Climate Dispatches from the London Review of Books

From 1 July, every other Friday for a year, the London Review of Books (LRB) will contribute a new literary dispatch about the weather in each one of the Network’s locations – reportage, essays, occasionally poetry – which will be published on the LRB blog and the WWN website alongside artwork generated by the Network, and in the monthly WWN newsletter.

Image: A park beside the Han river, 2022. Photo: Ahn Young-joon/AP/Shutterstock

Climate Conversations

A series of one-to-one conversations between leading artists and climate thinkers 

Presented by the World Weather Network, Climate Conversations brings together extraordinary international artists, designers, architects and writers with leading climate scientists, policy makers and activists, for one-to-one conversations about the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. Each conversation focuses on topics of shared interest between speakers from different cultural and disciplinary perspectives, and fosters pluralistic approaches to global challenges.   

More details to be announced in November 2022.

To receive updates from the World Weather Network, subscribe to the newsletter.

Your Weather Is Our Weather

Credits

World Weather Network is supported collectively by the participating arts agencies.

The participation in the World Weather Network of Artangel; Art Sonje Center, Seoul, Korea; Khoj International Artists' Association, New Delhi, India: Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, Philippines; and NGO and POOL, Johannesburg, South Africa  is supported by the British Council’s Creative Commissions for Climate Action, a global programme exploring climate change through art, science and digital technology.

Climate Dispatches are provided by the London Review of Books.

Artangel is generously supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels, and The Company of Angels.

Join Artangel and support extraordinary new art