The video work Weather Constructions consists of digital photogrammetric models. The debris of buildings, streets, organisms and plants meet the interior of a TV studio for weather forecasting and scientific instruments that are used in current weather research. Scanned after destructive floods and during scientific field tests, the digital models form a barren studio landscape: an image production site in which the hand of a weather presenter repeatedly gestures above the imaginary territory of temperatures, sun rays, and cloud accumulations. At the core of the human encounter with nature is the making of models. Through the abstraction and reduction of natural phenomena, knowledge is generated in order to gain control over one‘s own environment. Clouds take on a special role in these endeavors because their complex microphysical processes are largely unexplored. They are the weakest link in climate modeling processes. Imaging techniques based on photography are fundamental tools to better understand and model the processes in clouds. Using so-called holographic imagers, which are inserted into clouds by researchers using helium balloons, large databases of holographic images of individual cloud particles can be created. The images of these particles - the smallest units of the cloud - are categorized and simulated by trained neural net- works. In Weather Constructions, this holographic image data was converted to an audio track to point to the tradition of photographic cloud atlases. Ultimately, Weather Contructions is also a documentary experiment that reveals problems of the territory-map relationship in representative images of natural phenomena. In doing so, the project also adopts the processes it represents as its own method. The classic photographic image is extended into the third spatial dimension through digital photogrammetry, where a neural network attempts to construct a 3D shape based on the photographs. In this speculative process, visible errors, holes, and deformations are created, which emphasize on their modelledness. By this, the documentary character of the project and visual signifiers of objectivity are to be undermined, to point to the visual constructions of (natural) objects.
