The weather has been cancelled (TWHBC)

This limited edition publication is part of The weather has been cancelled (TWHBC), an artwork in the form of an interactive-fiction videogame. In the game environment, the player wakes up and discovers that the weather has been ‘cancelled’. Then the quest is revealed: The world needs you. You have to find out who cancelled the weather, and get it back! If you fail to restore the weather by midnight, all life on Earth will begin to perish. Good luck.

Subsequently, the player is left to dwell the weatherless earth.

The weather’s disappearance leaves a stunned world. Global speculation arises on who took the weather and what the possible relationship with climate change could be. Notably, now that the weather has disappeared, climate change has been ‘solved’… In a heated debate, the hard and soft sciences battle over what the weather is, different cultures question the disappearance of the weather as a mystical, supernatural event, philosophers debate the concept of nature in its Platonic form, while various countries blame geo-engineering and colonial enterprises. Meanwhile, people mourn the weather: through cultural expressions such as songs, poems, films and artworks.

How models represent climate change Decades of climate science communication have failed to affect significant socio-political change. This failing has often been assigned to the degree of abstractness of meteorological models of climate change. They build an abstract, distant world of changing averages and global thresholds. This representation merely shows a fraction of how this ecological disaster will affect the earth’s species, amongst which humans. 

For instance, how will climate change alter our experience of the environment, such as the atmosphere created by the colouring of the sky, the humidity sensed on our skins, the routines we practice entangled with our climate, and the culture we created in response to it? Looking through the lens of the cultural model, our increasingly disrupted weather patterns create a sense of disorientation, an on-site displacement: the feeling of remaining in the same location while the environment drastically changes around you. This disorientation is central to TWHBC and is heightened by the act of cancelling the weather altogether: we tweak our culture closely to the local weather patterns, loosing the weather means that a large part of this culture will be lost. Hence: cancelling the weather cancels culture. 

Reader The reader of The weather has been cancelled functions as an artwork in its own right. The structure resembles a colour fan, which can be read on both sides.

The first side offers the textual fan. Here the fixed and randomised scripts of the game can be read. The manner in which the texts offer interaction, blocking, and redirection can be seen as an act of experimental fiction writing. The publication allows the reader to navigate through the locations, intertitles, clips and other textual dimensions. The fan shape offers the reader the ability to navigate these locations in a non-chronological manner. Just as a player in the game, the reader can jump back and forth from different locations. Aside from the name, each location is marked by a code that corresponds to the game environment map included in this booklet.

The second side is the visual fan, which forms a language in its own right. TWHBC is an environment introspective of the building blocks which are used to model environments. The visuals reference different stages of digital environment making, from the McPaint swatches to immersive Blender environments to AI. In this evolution, minimal, abstract black and white environments slowly evolve to colourful worlds. 

Throughout the publication, the visual logic of Shortnotice Studio is interwoven. Rhythmical northern lights form a connective tissue of the booklet. As TWHBC is a world in which the weather is merely a memory, the transposed silver layer still depicts it in the form of an afterimage, forming a visual bridge between the past and present.