Mood Radar

2012

What: Graduation work for the Master Media Design and Communication: Networked Media, Piet Zwart Institute.
Where: Tent Rotterdam 2012, V2 Rotterdam 2012, Sign Groningen in 2013 and Venice Biennale 2013.

Mood Radar is a personal weather forecasting system based on your mood presence. Parked outside of TENT on the Witte de Withstraat on the opening night, participants received a personal reading in a semi-autonomous space resembling both weather station and gypsy caravan. Inside the this lab-caravan, a divining rod specially designed using a ‘para-rational’ approach measured the body’s unconscious movements and bio-electric signals to draw up a map of the participants mood. Acting as a personal weather forecast chart, a map generated by the reading revealed how one would experience the weather for the next day. Afterwards, the participants had the chance to become their own weather reporter, by presenting it using the same blue-screen technique as on television. By reversing the common sense statement ‘the weather affects your mood’ to ‘your mood affects the weather’, I flipped the linear understanding of causality, of subject and object, in an attempt to offer a space to contemplate upon causal factors that do not necessarily subscribe to a scientific paradigm. This work aimed to question the politics of knowledge production – how information is inquired in the face of uncertainty – and problematising the rational/irrational dichotomy by straddling it. The project also tried to playfully rethink the idea of uncertainty as a negative event while metaphorically alluding to discourse regimes which shape reality. Ultimately the aim of this body of research was to create a space that fostered a convergence of various sources of knowledge to deal with complex multiple realities.

As a part of the show, graphic design was utilized to help construct a support system that creates reality through the aesthetics of legitimacy. I designed the visual identity including logo, poster, infographics and the official website of the weather station. This work later manifested into Prediction TV, a solo exhibition at Showroom MAMA in 2012.

CHECK THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE!


Please official website for full video and photo documentation.