Dynamic complexity model

A cultural model of climate change.

The weather has been cancelled (TWHBC) is an artwork in the form of an interactive fiction videogame which functions as a cultural model for climate change. In the video game, the player wakes up and discovers that the weather has been ‘cancelled'. They are then left to dwell the weatherless earth.

While climate change is often portrayed in meteorological data, people connect to their climate culturally: in habits, clothing, language, religion and art. Similarly, people have difficulty speaking about climate change, but love speaking about the weather.
By cancelling the weather, the artwork exposes this a-symmetrical relationship between climate and weather.
In TWHBC climate change is portrayed as a terraforming assemblage: a non-linear phenomenon that unfolds over various scales, is always intertwined with other geopolitical issues, and that holds many ambiguous, contingent and invisible aspects. How to represent and subsequently solve something, that never fully reveals itself?

The weather’s disappearance leaves a stunned world, within this global emergency speculation arises on who took the weather, and the possible relationship wit climate change. Notably, now that the weather has disappeared, climate change has been solved. In the heated debate, the hard and soft sciences battle over what the weather is, different cultures question if this is mystical, supernatural phenomena, philosophers debate nature in its Platonic form, while different countries blame geo-engineering and colonial enterprises. But far more, people mourn the weather through culture: songs, poems, films and artworks.

The weather has been cancelled appears as a live film in which the player is a protagonist, it has a mesmerising soundtrack and a lyrical narrative. The visuals reference different stages in gaming history, are purposefully kept minimal. As much as there is an impossibility to imagine the full complexity of climate change, similarly there is an impossibility to imagine the world without the weather. Rather than creating a ‘finished’ game environment for the player to navigate, Visser engineers a fragmented, alluring, complex world that both reveals and withholds, in order to ignite the building of a complex world within the player’s imagination.

has been cancelled is supported by Creative Industries Fund and The Meertens Institute.
Concept development is supported by cultural climate models.

Concept, script: Jasmijn Visser
Game development: Ingmar König
3D modelling, animation: Ingmar König
Visual design: Jasmijn Visser
Sound design: Jasmijn Visser
Script editing: Nicky Rehnberg
Design consultation: S†ëfan Schäfer
Concept and design consultation: Ingmar König
Sound editing: Christoph Scherbaum
Conceptual consultation: Lantian Xie


Contributions by:
Diana Boshkomdieva
Lev & Roza
Lantian Xie
Jungki Beak
Audrey-Brown Pereira

Randomness and meaning.

Serf Club is an infinite film constructed from global live streams. A drama playing out in real life and in real time. The algorithmic director, influenced by intuitive, geographical, relational factors, modulates an audio-visual signal to make meaning appear and disappear. Shot reverse shot. Close-up on tangled plotlines. Build suspense and tear it down. Cut to cables snaking across borders. Cue music. Algorithmic real time film.

For the project Serf Club, Visser and design collective PWR re-evaluated mapping in the age of internet 2.0. This development coincided with the bombings and attacks of ISIS on Brussels, Munich and Istanbul, in which the livestream was a recurring medium of immediate information. They became interested in the livestream as an immediate map, as well as its aesthetics. This led to the creation of the continuous live film Serf Club, an algorithm gathering and displaying content in real time. Serf Club connects to 2500 livestreams distributed evenly over the world, and simultaneously generates narrative and sound. It is a tool continuously balancing between randomness and meaning.

In collaboration with PWR Studio.
Serf Club evolves with every viewing, the first version was shown at Delfina Foundation December 2016, continued at Transitdisplay in Prague and was streamed at CENART Mexico City as part of the exhibition Infosphere. Serf Club was featured as opening event at Transmediale 2018, Face Value.

AHRC/DFG-funded collaboration between UK and Germany

Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models (CCM).

This interdisciplinary project responds to calls for more humanities research on climate change by developing an innovative methodological approach to the cultural model. Scholars, especially from the field of literature studies, have long called for the inclusion of creative forms of communication to come to the rescue of the hard sciences in communicating the complexities of climate change. Where mathematical modelling is useful in scenario building and prediction, cultural modelling has the potential to uncover affective, contingent and atmospherical layers of climate change, and in that way to explain the phenomenon with life’s logic of complexity. CCM wants to contribute to climate communication by creating a first conceptual blueprint of the cultural model.

The project group brings together literary studies, linguistics, science & technology studies and literature pedagogy to investigate how different texts – cultural forms such as literature, social media, and literature reception in educational contexts can function in the describing (models of), while at the same time prescribing (models for), climate change.
The project is framed by interdisciplinary model theory.

Julia Hoydis (Klagenfurt)
Roman Bartosch (Cologne)
Carolin Schwegler (Cologne)
Martin Gurr (Duisburg-Essen)
David Higgins (Leeds)
Warren Pearce (Sheffield)
Ingmar König (Rotterdam)
Jöran Landschoff (Klagenfurt)


Jasmijn Visser is the artistic director of this CCM, which consists of the design its visual identity together with Ingmar König, the conceptualisation of climate modelling through artistic research, performance lectures and dataset conceptualisation.
https://www.cultural-climate-models.org

Complexity and geopolitical conflict.

For the publication Conflict Atlas—Geopolitics and Contingencies on the Malvinas/Falklands Archipelago, Visser shifted the centre of the world to the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas, and looked at global geopolitical conflict from the archipelago’s perspective, with a method of both stratifying vertically, as well as mapping horizontally. Global events are mirrored to local proceedings on the archipelago. Through this method it explores trade routes, colonial enterprises, patterns of migration, questions of identity, strategies in warfare and the role of the climate in social issues.

Within this tension field the atlas detects movements and events that are contingent in character and can reflect on general human behaviour in geopolitical conflicts.

Go to website

In collaboration with design collective Metahaven and Archive Books Berlin.
Commissioned by TAAK and Land Art Contemporary.
Contributions by: Clare Butcher, Tendai Mutunhu, Maurizio Lazzarato, Federico Lorenz, Metahaven, Tristan Mostert.
Launch the Netherlands: Allard Pierson Museum Amsterdam 2017.
Launch Germany: Hamburger Bahnhof Museum 2017.
Launch United Kingdom: Whitechapel Gallery 2017.
Launch South Korea: Song Eun Project Space 2018.

Climate into, inside, and out of war.

Climate as a Protagonist in War —Narrative Patterns and Aesthetics of Climate Agonalities within Geopolitical Conflict.

Climate and conflict are inseparable. Hence, there is an urgent need for discourse on future geopolitical conflicts in relation to climate change. However, to comprehend the exact challenges, it is important to understand the complex interrelations of climate in conflict. Visser researches three facets of this relationship through historical and contemporary cases: 1) How climate shifts evoke war; 2) Climate as a protagonist in war; and 3) War as a cause of climate/environmental change.
In sum, climate into, inside, and out of war.

Climate as a Protagonist in War especially looks at how historical narrative patterns and aesthetics surrounding climate events still shape the climate change debate.

Climate as a Protagonist in War is an long term project which will consist of various incarnations; such as essays, performance lectures, multimedia artworks and more.

Essay:
A Global Climate Event: Climate into, inside, and out of war
Jasmijn Visser and S†ëfan Schäfer
In Clothed Conflicts, Publication series 
Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet)
Volume 16, upcoming 2025.
Download pdf English here and German here.
https://archiv.hkw.de/en/media/publikationen/2022_publikationen/publikation_verstrickte_konflikte_das_neue_alphabet.php

A Global Climate Event (excerpt)
Drifting Curriculum Seoul
Issue 2
http://driftingcurriculum.org/i2-b

Performance:
A Global Climate Event
Haus der Kulturen der Welt 2021
Event: Recoding Alphabets

IDK Umweltdenken colloquium 2022
Rachel Carson Center Munich & WZU Augsburg

Eco-emergencies across media conference.
Kalmar Sweden 2023

Climate and conflict.

Although the exhibition Modern Candor concerns the Falklands/ Malvinas conflict, visitors to the Allard Pierson Museum will only find two maps of the archipelago. Instead, artist Jasmijn Visser hascreated an installation with a selection of rare books and maps of Panama, Zimbabwe, Nepal and the moon from the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam. Some of these materials have never been exhibited before.

Using a geographical perspective based around the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas, Visser shows, for example, how the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 changed global trade routes, which greatly reduced the importance of the port on the Falkland Islands; or how since 2009, Zimbabweans have been clearing the landmines that the Argentinians planted on the islands during the Falklands War with the United Kingdom in 1982. Visser highlights these relationships in the texts on the floor-plan that leads the visitors through the exhibition, guiding them from scene to scene, always highlighting the relationship between conflict, geology and climate. In this way, Visser connects local events on the islands with major turning points in world history. In this exhibition, conceived as a singular installation, Visser combines maps and books from the Special Collections with infographics that she made in collaboration with Metahaven for the publication Conflict Atlas—Geopolitics and Contingencies on the Malvinas/Falklands Archipelago.

Allard Pierson Museum Amsterdam 2017.
Partners: Metahaven, Archive Books Berlin, Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam, TAAK, LACDA.
'Modern Candor' is an exhibition on the occasion of the launch of Conflict Atlas—Geopolitics and Contingencies on the Malvinas/Falklands Archipelago by Jasmijn Visser & Metahaven.

Heatwave, never forget.

What constitutes ‘climate change news’ in the online sphere? How to make sense of fragmented narratives on the climate disaster on various platforms? What do you learn about climate change when you don’t read the news?

Rather than focusing on conventional news sources, Visser explores incidental, or hidden narratives, such as in entertainment/lifestyle news, microblogging, social media, webshops and advertising. Following media theory such as Bird and Dardenne’s (1987) idea of ‘news as mythological narrative’, Visser explores if the totality of online postings of climate change could be viewed as an overarching story, and if so, what does this story teach us about our social construction of climate change?
Within these online narratives, Visser uncovers image-text relationships in postings. She researches what the function is of the duplication, incarnation and transformation of online climate change vernaculars. Can you survive (without) Summer reveals a socio-technical assemblage in which unity and diversity are constantly at play.

Performance:
Can you survive (without) Summer?

Cleptocrazia exhibition event
Villa Romana 2021

IDK colloquium
Rachel Carson Center Munich & WZU Augsburg 2022

Tuesday discussion
Rachel Carson Center Munich 2022

Cultural Climate Models workshop
Leeds University 2022

Salon Corporel
In collaboration with Daniel Neugebauer & Lantian Xie
Artep Gallery Iași
October 2024

In collaboration with Amanda Wasielewski
Digital humanities department
Uppsala University Sweden
October 2024

Performance:
Breaking news from Earth.

IDK colloquium 2023
Rachel Carson Center Munich & WZU Augsburg

Digital methods lecture series
University of Sheffield

Article:
Between depiction and Meaning
In collaboration with Laura Fumagalli
WZU Augsburg
Upcoming 2025

Water-tap-clock.

The Stopper is a project by Jungki Beak and Jasmijn Visser, which explores the power structures of time.

The Stopper I is a livestream on a water-tap-sculpture in Jungki Beak’s apartment in Seoul. The tap leaks drops precisely on the second, creating a tapping sound equal to a clock. The Stopper I is an incantation of boredom and frustration: filling the space with the slow progressing rhythm of seconds, the viewer has no choice to remain passive while being confronted with the passing of time.

The Stopper II is an interactive website in which a rhythm is composed through sound, visuals and intervals in time. On the second, intervalling numbers drop in the manner of the famous Bürk Klappzahlenuhr. The user can push the stop button to stop the current counting interval, but after a second, a new interval appears, igniting a choreography. The user can actively stop time, but can’t control counter-events from occurring, thus never fully gaining control over time.

The Stopper draws its title from a personal tale. Ruth, Vissers' grandmother, earned her livelihood producing mechanisms for industrial clocks in the Bürk factory in the Black Forest, known for station clocks, as well as punch-in time clocks. There she drilled holes in gears for over three decades. An infamous protagonist in the Bürk factory was known as The Stopper. Once a month, he would monitor the workers’ productivity and efficiency, one at a time. On a small stool, he sat by Ruth, and audited her production and assembly pace, stopping the time with the finishing of each tiny element. Careful not to work either faster or slower than usual, she would work on the mechanics in complete synchronicity with The Stopper. With this act a tiny universe was created: The Stopper stopping time in the time production factory.

In an era marked by immediacy, accelerated information circuits, efficiency protocols and digitisation, stopping becomes a violent act which immediately casts the individual outside of society.

Go to website

In collaboration with Jungki Beak.
Commissioned by Kunsthalle Amsterdam & Delfina Foundation London.
Exhibited Moscow Biennial For Young Art 2018.
SongEun Project Space Seoul 2018.
Delfina Foundation London 2019.
VondelCS Amsterdam 2019.

I see right through you numbers.

We, the Presidents of Planet Earth explores how collective memory operates within the boundaries of culturally defined perceptions of time and space, taking the plight of the Kalmyk as a case study. After the Soviet attempt to eliminate the complete Kalmyk culture, Kalmykia at present is collectively working to rebuild and re-appropriate their culture. Within this ongoing dialogue, a tension field between power, culture and science unfolds.

Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885 - 1922) had been raised in Kalmykia, as his father was an administrator of the nomadic Kalmyk’s. This culture, what he dubbed ‘the Kingdom of Horses’ highly influenced his proposals for mathematics as a universal language. The Buddhist notion of time as an interval played an important role in his proposals for new visualisations of time and space. The archive, comprising over 300 sketches, ao. shows proposals of new schematic timelines, intervals –time constellations– in order to formulate a new understanding of the human construct of time.

We, the Presidents of Planet Earth is a dialogue between Khlebnikov and the Kalmyk, through which they explore their past, present and utopian future. In this dialogue they address intervalling rhythm, in which collective memory is narrated. Schäfer and Visser will explore this dialogue through aesthetics, narrative patterns and theory.

Film and Publication in development, expected 2024.
In collaboration with Elena Vogman and S†ëfan Schäfer.
Together with Archive Books Berlin.

Perpetual countdown

12 years left; 2 degrees; half earth. The future is rendering.

www.fleeting-earth.live

Little Brother was launched at the exhibition ART FWRD, Museumnight 2019. In collaboration with Kunsthalle Amsterdam. The launch coincided with the release of the article occur at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen. Designed by Trang Ha

Complex, more complex, invisible.
The crisis of our physical climate is also a crisis of representation. This crisis has roots in the complex nature of climate change: the intrinsically plural phenomenon is stratified over all layers of our society and thus interwoven with a large array of other geopolitical issues. Moreover, overshadowed by these issues, climate change remains often invisible. It leads to the question: how to represent something which does not represent itself?

In an age of Post Normal Science, experiments in modelling should embrace the collaboration of the sciences, humanities and the arts. The latter are uniquely equipped to frame a particular characteristic of climate change: the contingent, uncertain, ambiguous, risky and absent.

Go to article

Partners:
Kunstfort Vijfhuizen.
Kunsthalle Amsterdam.
Meertens Institute Amsterdam.

Crowd psychology in the digital age

A Crowded Sky gathers a group of diverse artists looking at crowd psychology from different strata. In the exhibition space artworks appear and disappear on various locations. Through this time-based format (duration cycle: 80 minutes) the artworks merge into one conversation and simultaneously the artists fuse into one crowd.

Internet 2.0 has enabled crowds to gather in new constellations. At the same time, developments in machine learning have increased crowd surveillance, while algorithmic crowd simulation is deployed to predict future human movements. The exhibition deals with these new and urgent themes in an exhibition in which light, sound and video works alternate in a theatrical way, like actors in a play.

A Crowded Sky is curated and designed by Jasmijn Visser & S†ëfan Schäfer.

Artist as Curator.
Exhibition on crowd psychology for Impakt.
The exhibition presents works by Lawrence Lek, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Lantian Xie & Jaebum Kim, Tools for Action, Anna Ådahl, and Jasmijn Visser and S†ëfan Schäfer.
Special thanks to Christoph Scherbaum.
Utrecht, The Netherlands 2020.


Download booklet

Bachelor’s Delight is a project by artist Jasmijn Visser in collaboration with designer S†ëfan Schäfer and historian Tristan Mostert, designed for Museum van Loon in 2015.

The exhibition takes shape of a quadriptych, with the website as the first part, together with a poster, digital installation, and objects from the museum’s inventory. These different elements can be viewed separately, but also inform each other. The poster operates as a guide through the website and the installation.

Bachelor’s Delight follows an extensive historical research on the Atlas van Loon by Visser and Mostert. Schäfer and Visser used the museum’s eclectic interior in order to design the project’s visual identity.

Go to website (includes a downloadable verison of the poster).

In collaboration with S†ëfan Schäfer.
Supported by Mondrian Foundation and AFK.
Special thanks to Cato Koole, Philippa van Loon, Tonko Grever, Heerko van der Kooij and Anonymous Production.
Photo Credits: Gert Jan van Rooij.