Professor Friederike Otto and Jeanette Winterson in Conversation
- Event type
- Lecture
- Address
- Senate House Library, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
- Speakers
- Fredi Otto (Imperial College, London), Jeanette Winterson (British Writer)
- Event dates
- Contact
- sas.events@sas.ac.uk Email only
A Thousand Words for Weather is an in-person experience taking place at London's Senate House Library. Created by London-based arts commisioner and producer Artangel, known for presenting large scale art projects in unfamilair spaces, it forms their contribution to the World Weather Network (WWN) – an international gathering of 29 arts organisations from around the world.
As part of WWN, each organisation will be taking on the guise of a weather station for a year from 21 June 2022, producing reports, alerts and forecasts that all seek to integrate the imagination of creative artists with the knowledge of climate scientists and environmental thinkers.
This urgency and the partnership of arts with climate science will be aptly articulated through this conversation that combines two contrasting minds, meeting for the first time across disciplines.
Fredi Otto is a Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College, London. A physicist with a doctorate from the Free University Berlin in philosophy of science in 2011, she joined the University of Oxford in the same year where she was director of the Environmental Change Institute. Otto’s main research interest is on extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves and storms, and understanding to what extent these are made more severe due to climate change attribution as outlined in her publication Angry Weather.
Jeanette Winterson is a British Writer. Her first novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was published in 1985. She has written more than 20 books of fiction and non- fiction, including the memoir: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Her work is published in 27 countries. She has won numerous awards, including a BAFTA for her BBC adaptation of Oranges . Her latest book is a collection of essays about A1: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Her TED talk on AI, delivered at the 2022 TED conference in Vancouver is available on YouTube. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester.
About A Thousand Words for Weather
A Thousand Words for Weather is a specially commissioned sound installation presented by Artangel and Senate House Library that probes the connection between the environment, language, translation, sound and silence.
The new sonic experience was born out of a collaboration between writer Jessica J. Lee, sound artist Claudia Molitor, and seven London-based poets who speak ten of the most commonly heard mother tongues in the city.
Each poet chose and defined ten words for the weather in Arabic, Bengali, English, German, French, Mandarin, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, or Urdu. They then went on to translate one another's chosen weather words or phrases, contributing to a unique multilingual weather ‘dictionary’ that seeks to generate a shared language describing our collective experiences of changing climate and environment, whilst exploring the nuances of language
These words form a sound piece, integrated with a bespoke playback system designed by software architect Peter Chilvers to input data from the Met Office, so the audio constantly reflects the live, local changes in the weather.
All welcome. This event is free to attend, but booking is required.
