Week 01: Floating with Weather Balloons

Responding to Emergent Strategy Prompts

Q: In your view, what is the function of humans in the universe?

I dont see humans as healers or translators the way Adrienne Maree Brown imagines. Humans feel more like parasites but not the kind that help keep balance. We create chaos then try to organize it and in the process make more chaos. We cut into ecosystems draw borders build walls and call it progress. Other parasites usually serve some role in keeping things steady but we just destabilize everything land climate even our own communities. If we have a function maybe its to show what happens when a species refuses to live in balance a warning about the cost of endless extraction and control.

Q: Do artists, designers, and technology have that same or similar responsibility? What are the nuances between those roles?

Mostly yes. Sometimes a painter literally creates the image for someone to see. But in performance art like drag, the performer leans on props music projections to spark the viewers imagination or at least make it hit harder more appealing more engaging. Technology and design can be invisible in that process or they can be the thing that carries the whole illusion. All of it mixes together to open a door in the mind of whoever is watching.

Q: Which of the elements of emergent strategy feels most evident in your creative work?

Fractals. The small choices I make always echo in the bigger thing. A color a sound a gesture ends up shaping the whole mood. With weather balloons the small stuff like the skin of the balloon stretching or the pressure inside connects to the big stuff like borders surveillance climate politics. The pattern repeats small to large. Same with found object art. You start with scraps or broken pieces and together they make something larger more powerful. The small details carry the whole weight of the piece.

Initial Questions & Curiosities about Weather Balloons

• Who sent the first one up and what did they want from it?

• How did it go from science to politics to military eyes in the sky?

• When the balloon pops where does all that trash land who cleans it up or does it just rot somewhere?

• Could people use them for art for community for listening to the air instead of just surveillance?

• What does it mean when something made to measure becomes a spectacle

How the Reading Shaped My Thinking

Emergent Strategy made me stop seeing the balloon as just a tool. It showed me it is part of a living system. The balloon is not separate from people or power it is wrapped up in both. brown talks about fractals and adaptation and I see that here too. Small details latex helium air pressure connect to bigger things like borders control climate fear. The balloon is never just the balloon it is part of the story we keep telling.

Playing with the Topic

Weather balloons don’t have to be just data collectors they could be played with. What if they carried poems or secrets instead of sensors. What if sending one up was like a drag show in the sky a performance you could only see for a moment. What if communities built their own hacked balloons to listen to the air together. What if I tied a GoPro to one and only let it float a few feet up from my roof so it became like an air tripod filming me from above. A bird’s eye stream of me performing on the roof shifting surveillance into stage lighting.

The balloon could be research or it could be the stage itself. The video feed could become entries in a field guide to the sky or screenshots in a zine. The guide could be speculative instructions for how to reclaim balloons for art instead of borders. Or it could be a playbook full of rituals like tie your worries to the string send a message to the birds release a camera and let it forget you.

Play here is taking the balloon back from science and the military and turning it into something else. A diary in the sky a watcher turned into a witness an object of war made into an object of spectacle. Letting it drift into art into imagination into something softer.

Next Steps

I want to map out the systems wrapped around weather balloons science military art environment. Each one treats the balloon differently a tool a weapon a toy a stage. From there I’ll figure out what kind of guide makes sense maybe a field guide to strange sky objects maybe a zine that shows how to build your own and use it for something useless and fun. The point is to take the balloon out of its serious role and play with it. To make something small that grows bigger the way a balloon stretches until it floats.