Cyclone

Cyclone brings together two contemporary phenomena: the charting of severe weather conditions, and the polarized nature of debate that occurs online.

The project maps textual conversation taken from the political and religious newsgroups to the isobars of a dynamic, interactive weather visualization of hurricanes, whose complex structures are used to visualize the conversational churn and eddies of the newsgroup conversations.

In staging these interactions as a process of meteorological precipitation, newsgroup conversations “condense” in the works environment as a temporal ambient patterning – a structuring that acts not only as a metonym of difference, but of ideological tensions which mirror the dynamics of social space.