Talking about the weather

"The air you just exhaled has already spread far and wide. The CO₂ from a breath last week may now be feeding a plant on a distant continent, or plankton in a frozen sea. In a matter of months all of the CO₂ you just exhaled will have dispersed around the planet." -Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers. 'Talking About the Weather' is an ongoing cross media project sparked by the terrifying spectre of global climate change. Sheer terror at the possibilities that are being talked about led us to talking about the weather. In this project weathertalk is no longer a banal exchange of local weather conditions, but instead we ask people to donate their breath - the breath which they would normally use to talk about the weather and the same breath that is spread far and wide as described by Tim Flannery. Working with breath emphasises the dynamic nature of the atmosphere and our part in its creation and destruction. As Tim Flannery says, every breath you take makes you part of a dynamic system called the atmosphere, or the aerial ocean. 'Talking about the Weather' involves performative encounters, where we perform two Australian visitors to a foreign place asking for donations to our breath collection (to be the largest in the world) with which we will blow back global warming. These performative encounters continue our work with the pataphysical mode of an imaginary solution for an actual problem: in this case global warming. The work is process oriented involving both the encounters themselves as well as sound and video documenting of the encounters. It plays with the form of various documentary methods working between documentary and documentation. Exhibition held at Wollongong City Gallery 26 April-28 May 2008.