Semaphore to Satellite
A study into weather and the technological sublime

This series of projects focuses on the communication architectures that document and transmit information about the weather, from weather monitoring stations to major news networks and scientific think tanks.

Disaster, far-flung futures, and desperate signals have emerged at the juncture of weather and communication. From the collapsing ice shelves in Antarctica as recorded by NASA satellite imagery, to the prospect of farming in space as an alternative to a potentially uninhabitable earth, these projects consider the technological sublime as it emerges and is made within communication technologies.

This project further considers how notions of the "total earth" emerged with satellite images of the globe. At the same time that the earth emerged as one system or ecology through these technologies, dynamic weather events consistently interrupted a clear planetary view. The weather, this study suggests, repeatedly erodes a transparent and fixed view of the earth.

Related projects are available at "Visualizing Antarctica as a Place in Time" published through Space and Culture; "Satellite Gardens"; and "Weather and the Eroding Globe" a paper given at the "Globalisation and Representation" conference at the University of Brighton, March 2005.

Initial fieldwork for this project has been conducted in Iceland, 2004. An expanded version of this project has been accepted for further development by the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008.