Late last night, as I was leaving the station, a photo of wildfire on a large digital billboard briefly tinted the train hall in a vibrant red. “United Nations: Earth on track for 2.8°C of warming.” The station was rather empty. I was almost by myself on a passageway usually bustling with hundreds of people. And so I was alone with this forecast. The sheer size of it made it register differently than reading it on a small screen.

The image was only visible for perhaps five seconds. In the ten minutes I waited for the segment to repeat other news and ads scrolled by repeatedly: EV charging infrastructure in Germany is improving; the Great Wall of China was built with rice, learn more; discover skiing in the dolomites; super hero movie; new robot vacuum.

We moved, and live in Hamburg now. I'm still in the process of moving on from New York, still in motion.

As its signals travel through air rather than cable, the mesh depend on fair weather. It easily handles most conditions (I've used the mesh full-time for four years. It has been very reliable.) but extreme weather can cause my speed to drop or my home to go offline. A cold spell has frozen ice slush to the antennas, putting my internet out until it got warmer. The noise of torrential rain can degrade the connection across the river to Manhattan and grind to a halt home office workers' work video calls. When strong winds pushed the antenna out of alignment, the neighbors all lost connection. In time, a tree in my neighbor's backyard will grow into my antenna's line-of-sight and block the signal — at least in the warmer months when the tree has leaves.

I appreciate experiencing the internet somewhat synced to weather and natural cycles. The digital is never separate from the material world, naturally, but that is made easy to forget. Writing this reminds me of Solar Protocol, a network of solar-powered servers that routes internet traffic to whichever server receives the most sunshine at that moment. The project not only makes visible this connection but reimagines critical infrastructure as an emission-free public good.

In 2020 412 ppm I started working on a project that also alluded to the interconnected systems between technology, network, data, art, weather, and climate: an art installation for a glass-enclosed gallery on the top floor of the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, MA.

The project's core was a camera mounted to the glass roof of the museum, pointed at the sky. Using the camera feed and weather data, a custom software continuously selected works from the museum’s digitized collections by linking color, meteorological observations, and artwork metadata. The selected works were displayed on a screen in the gallery, overlaid on the sky photo that selected them.

In a sense, the weather curated the exhibition. Sometimes the links were literal, pairing blue skies with lush landscape paintings or abstract works in shades of blue. Other times, a pairing would suggest more complex associations.

Shown below is a partly cloudy sky at dusk, with a portrait of Adele Lehman, a philantrophist whose families made fortunes with copper mines during the dawn of electricity. If you allow it, a New England sunset made a connection to the digital networks's most basic element. Adele Lehman was married to Arthur Lehman, whose family bank in 2008 started a global financial crisis. Research suggests that financial crises, unsurprisingly, reduce countries' resilience to climate change.

Sympoiesis is a concept coined by Beth Dempster, and Dona Haraway, of "making together”, between living and non-living systems without spatial or temporal boundaries. I called my project Sympoietic System to acknowledge that climate and weather influence artmaking — and art in turn the weather. In the best cases, art may sway minds towards climate action, or help process climate grief. More often than not, art is creating its own toll through its wasteful practices. The fortunes that pay for name plaques on museum wings need art to get away with ever more extraction.

The exhibition was repeatedly delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During that time, the sky above my home was tinted orange twice — in 2021 and 2023 — by the ashes of wildfire smoke carried to the city from faraway burns. Both times I wondered which artworks the system might have surfaced from the collection.

I like to imagine the system running long-term, a decade or longer. Individual images of the sky would become records of weather patterns and, eventually, of the climate and its accelerating warming. How many more New England snow storms would it capture and match with faint pencil drawings on white paper from the collection, how many more exhaustingly hot and humid Summer days paired with abstract paintings in red and blue?

I've added labels to dates on this website that show the global average atmospheric CO₂ levels at that time. Today is August 24th, 2023 420 ppm

Ppm is short for “parts-per-million,” the unit used for measuring CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere. Humans have increased this number significantly since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid 18th century 280 ppm, mainly by burning fossil fuels. Learn more.

I first saw dates connected to ppm CO₂ levels on the social media bios of climate activists: “Greta Thunberg, born at 375ppm.” Adding this data to my website is far from activism. I care deeply about the climate crisis and consider it in most of my decision making, but most of my past work has not been explicitly connected to the issue. I'm not sure making eco-art in the future would be my most useful contribution, either.

For now, it's simply interesting to me to connect the brief history of my artistic practice (since 396 ppm) to the most urgent crisis unfolding in my lifetime. I'm reflecting on my past work and what I want to make in the future. The climate crisis already colors that thinking but the little number makes it all the more tangible.

Written at 420 ppm.

P.S. — I created a simple API to fetch this data from NOAA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It's open source on Github and entirely based on static files to be the least carbon-intensive.

I mostly hear two types of birds from my apartment in Brooklyn. The first is the couple of mourning doves that visit my fire escape every year. The other is the call of the crow of late capitalism — the croaking reverse-gear buzzer of the Amazon Prime truck delivering packages to my building almost daily. The boxes pile up in the lobby, as if the bird's building a nest.