OPEN CALL: Lovely Weather

Leonardo Publications are inviting papers, special issue proposals and book proposals that deal with artistic approaches to weather, climate and their modifications. Western societies have progressively dissolved their ancestral link to climate, a link that was critical: the question for food. This is largely a result of massive urbanization and the development of the modern lifestyle. It has been possible to observe a deterioration of sensitivity to meteorology and climate.

Today, very few professions still reveal a direct relationship to climate; our intuitive understanding of it is thus weakened. Artifical indoor climates have given us a sort of second skin but also leveled our general experience of climate. Until recently, in consumer societies, the weather forecast has mainly been used for the organization of one's leisure, and "talking about the weather" has a social function. It is no surprise, then, that the science of meteorology is still believed to be one of the last "objective" sciences.

From a scientific point of view, climate (as well as weather) can be divided into series of meteorological parameters such as temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind force, etc. However, it seems impossible to conceive it as a totality except in subjectives terms. Weather and climate exist as such only for corporal and sensitive being and can be regarded phenomenolgically speaking, as a landscape.

Landscape does not exist in nature without the eye, which grasps an expanse of land as a landscape. Weather's and climate's existence are similar. The perception of weather and climate is the perception of an arrangement, a configuration of the real. Weather and climate are thus a multidimensional phenomenon in which are combined the contributions of nature, culture, history and geography, but also the imaginary and the symbolic.

Art could help us to question our perceptions and relationships to weather, climate and their changes. Artistic explorations should not be restricted to illustrating our scientific discoveries, as is done in contemporary climate-change showcases. Art could instead help us to experience and reveal our inner participation with weather and climate, the rupture of their balance and its meaning for our inner world, in the same way that landscape artists reframed the relationship of humans to their environment.

Leonardo seeks to document the works of artists, researchers, and scholars involved in the exploration of weather and climate (change), and is soliciting texts for Leonardo Journal and Leonardo Transactions, special issue proposals for the Leonardo Electronic Almanac and book proposals for Leonardo Book Series.

Sub-themes:

We are interested in a very broad array of artworks that encompass visual arts, sound art and music, performance and performing arts, etc, as well as in climate sciences, meterology and social sciences.

Following thematic sub-themes have been defined (but the call is not limited to them):

- Environments: weather and climate works enabling new experiences of environments;

- Meteorological and climate sciences: artworks questioning and linking to these sciences. What dialogue with air pollution meteorology, weather modification, climate sciences and climate history;

- Weather and climate technologies: artworks questioning and linking to these technologies as space based global monitoring satellites and their databases, as well as remote sensing technologies;

- Sustainability: artworks engaged in alternative energy ressources or climate memories for example;

- Social and political action: weather and climate works which may spur new thinking for action on environments;

- Weather and climate perceptions and/or narratives: poetical perceptions/narratives of weather and climate phenomena. What for ontological issues about transience and mutability may be engaged in such artworks? Artworks engaged in weather and climate fiction (real or imaginary weather/climate phenomena, climates and weather phenomena on other planets).

The "Lovely Weather" Editorial Group on Art & Climate includes: John Cunningham, Annick Bureaud, Ramon Guardans, Drew Hemment, Julien Knebusch, Roger Malina, Jacques Mandelbrojt, Andrea Polli and Janine Randerson. A moderated discussion on the topic, moderated by Janine Randerson, will begin this fall on the YASMIN network: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin

Author instructions:
Leonardo Journal: http://leonardo.info/isast/journal/editorial/edguides.html, Roger Malina, Executive Editor
Leonardo Transactions: http://www.leonardo-transactions.com/, Ernest Edmonds, Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo Electronic Almanac: http://leoalmanac.org/cfp/calls.asp, Nisar Keshvani, Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo Book Series: http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/guidelines.html, Sean Cubitt, Editor-in-Chief
Art & Climate Leonardo project: http://www.olats.org/fcm/artclimat/artclimat_eng.php
General Inquiries should be sent to: leonardolovelyweather@gmail.com