Weathering Ports:
Sensing, Performing, and Acting Bodies

2023 Performance Research, activism, DIY bike, performance, wind anemometer, speaker units, teensy, amps, PM2.5 sensors, gas sensors, heartbeat sensors

Weather
Performance
Weathering Ports

Completed

Weathering Ports: Sensing, Performing, and Acting Bodies is an artistic research project that investigates the polluted weather of the Maasvlakte, an artificial industrial zone within the Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port. Drawing on the conceptual methodology of Weathering (Neimanis and Hamilton, 2018), the project approaches this weather as an embodied phenomenon and develops artistic practices and tactics that bring the human body into contact with the port’s weather, environment, ecology, and pollution as material.

A DIY apparatus mounted on a bicycle offers a critical perspective on the use of pollution-exposed sites as popular cycling spots. The apparatus is used in a four-hour cycling performance through Maasvlakte, in which the human body metamorphoses into a bio-archive of polluting weather. Wind direction and speed, toxic gas levels, and bodily metrics affected by the weather, such as body temperature and heartbeat, converge into real-time sound emitted from horn speakers.

Weathering Ports aims to transcend the nature–culture and human–environment dichotomies, as the artists become weather-bodies that sense, perform, and act upon polluted weather.

Weathering Ports:Sensing, Performing, and Acting Bodies

Weathering Ports:
Sensing, Performing, and Acting Bodies