‘Whithervane’ Project Shows Which Way the Internet’s Bad News Is Blowing
(Dezeen)
Sometimes the Internet feels like a force of nature — raging in one direction, descending into eerie calm, and then erupting like a storm out of nowhere. Try as we might to guess what will happen next, we’re all about as good as the local meteorologist at predicting which way the Internet’s winds will blow next.
A design studio called Rootoftwo has lately explored this very comparison by way of creating — of all things — a kind of high-tech descendent of the venerable weather vane. This object, instead of reflecting the gusts of the physical world, “tracks the orchestrations of fear in real time, by monitoring internet newsfeeds.”
Five of these “Whithervanes” have been installed on buildings in England, in conjunction with an arts event. They take the form of headless chickens — evidently meant as a comment on the way many of us react to Internet news already.
According to a writeup in Dezeen, the objects rely on a Raspberry Pi mini computer as part of a system that scans online news, searching for scary keywords. The findings are cross-matched with the geographic location of the reported problem or threat, and the Whithervane swivels away from the negative news — forever avoiding potential trouble.
The upshot, the designers tell Dezeen, are “weather vanes for the information age — devices that indicate the rhythm of news information and make us aware of our ability to make decisions in spite of it.”
Rootoftwo from Folkestone Triennial on Vimeo.
The headless chicken reportedly also responds to other scanned data, such as marketing efforts, and can apparently be manipulated in part by way of direct prompts via hashtagged tweets. Dezeen describes all this as an effort to “subvert the traditional weather vane,” but it’s not clear to me how that’s the case (or why weather vanes might be worth subverting).
I would say instead that the weather vane form has merely been borrowed for an online-age function, and is in fact a very apt object to apply to the idea of monitoring “what’s happening” on the Internet. We can look at a real-life weather vane to learn something about the weather right this second — but almost nothing about the past, and even less about what will happen next. The Whithervane is a similarly crude measure of our Digital Now. And isn’t that what we’re mostly concerned with, anyway?
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