NEON joins the newly founded ground-breaking alliance of art institutions from 28 countries across the world to form the World Weather Network, creating an international digital platform of artistic creation in response to global climate crisis.
For the World Weather Network, NEON presents 112, Climate Tone, a contemporary art project with a focus on climate change and the environmental crisis as an urgent and ongoing condition. In this context, three weather stations will be created – sonic, visual and dialogue-based – that will supply material to the World Weather Network online platform with the intention to broadcast an alert for the climate.
112 is the pan-European telephone number for the communication of information about emergencies, upcoming or ongoing. In recent years, such emergencies are becoming increasingly and systematically linked to climate change, almost identifying the number 112 with the environmental crisis; a ringtone on a mobile phone becomes both an update on a local event and a reminder of the ongoing global environmental catastrophe.
For 112, Climate Tone, NEON commissions two artists, Greek composer and sound artist Stavros Gasparatos, and photographer Natalia Tsoukala, supported by the project’s Scientific Advisor Professor of Meteorology and Climatology Prodromos Zanis, Lead Author of the 6th chapter of the 2021 IPCC report, addressing the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change.
The sonic station, operated by sound artist and composer Stavros Gasparatos, will explore the correlation of sound with current and historic meteorological data recorded by weather stations in Greece. Investigating the experience of hearing an alert tone from the 112 emergency number as the origin of a ripple that awakens sensory temporal paths that produce chains of thoughts and automated meanings, Gasparatos will create an online sonic machine that responds and alerts us to current weather phenomena and the climate crisis. A warning tone for the climate.
The visual station, operated by photographer Natalia Tsoukala, will record the transformations of the landscape in Greece by energy production and distribution networks, responding to the energy industry’s widespread and substantial disruption of the climate on a global scale. From rural power stations to the everyday terrain that energy consumption practices construct in the metropolis of Athens, Natalia Tsoukala will create a photographic record that reports on the developing narrative of Greece in 2022 in parallel with images that capture the everyday weather.
The dialogues (podcasts) are a series of short recordings, podcasts which intend to send a localised signal from our geographical position to the world; Greece sending a local warning signal from the climate change hot-spot of the Mediterranean Basin to the global ecosystem. Greek scientists, locals affected by differing forms of climate change, groups working to counter-act the change that we are experiencing, and those making the ultimate decisions that are affecting our lives will take part in accessible and informative conversations with the aim of illuminating a subject still not part of everyday discourse in Greece.