When do we look out, when do we look in?
Torin Francis
9 February - 2 March 2024
Torin Francis, When do we look out, when do we look in?, (2024). Detail, weather balloon and acrylic, courtesy of the artist © Torin Francis
When do we look out, when do we look in? is a continuation of research and investigation into the material properties of weather balloons and the interrelationships between body, time and space. Through a site responsive approach, Francis unpacks ideas of temporality and impermanency in relation to the body through sculptural intervention. Water is used as a material and metaphor for time cycles and torn remnants of latex balloons are suspended in states of transition. When do we look out, when do we look in? looks to unpack the complexities and limitations of Western conceptions of linear time and the impact of place on shaping understandings of spatiotemporal experience.
Torin Francis is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist originally from London. His practice considers the devices we use to quantify, navigate, and comprehend the way in which the passing of time is perceived and experienced. This engagement with these mechanisms is explored through poetic relationships between objects and space in site-responsive installations, kinetic sculpture, assemblage, and moving image works. Since graduating from Honours in Fine Art at the Queensland University of Technology in 2017, Francis has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions locally and interstate. He has been awarded a number of prizes and grants and continues to work as an artist assistant with various artists and assists with the fabrication and installation of exhibitions for museums and galleries.
JWAC Gallery
Cnr Brunswick and Berwick Streets
420 Brunswick Street
Fortitude Valley Q 4006
(map here)
When do we look out, when do we look in? contains humidifiers and water and as a result the gallery space may be warmer than usual. Some surfaces may be wet so please step carefully when visiting the exhibition. There are moving elements in this exhibition.
Documentation by Louis Lim
Exhibition Text
Kyle weise
Elemental materials – water, light and air - form the basis of Torin Francis’s When do we look out, when do we look in? If these seem like grand, magisterial building blocks for an exhibition, they are mediated via relatively quotidian and unassuming objects: a domestic dehumidifier sited high on a gallery wall, from which water slowly drips, and fragments of decomposing weather balloons arranged both within and without frames.¹
Weather balloons have long been a part of Francis’s practice, where they have been inflated and deflated, torn, flattened and rolled, placed inside and outside, but always kept grounded. Of course, in their regular use, weather balloons are released into the air to float up into the clouds, laden with instruments for the statistical measurement of atmospheric forces. Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics and of systems of communication and control central to the development of modern computing, used the weather as an example of a system so complex and dynamic that it evades predictability: “If all the readings of all the meteorological stations on earth were simultaneously taken, they would not give a billionth part of the data necessary to characterize the actual state of the atmosphere from a Newtonian point of view.”² As such, weather balloons are burdened, not just with technical instruments, but also with a sense of futility. This is suggested by their appropriation in Francis’s practice, which withdraws the balloons from productivity and transforms them into raw material for sculptural assemblage.
In the past, the weather was understood as being apart from humans, its vagaries were something to be resigned to. There was no expectation that we would comprehend something for which godswere responsible. Peter Sloterdijk notes the contrast of this to the contemporary world, where there is an increasing subjectivisation of the weather. This is partly due to the development of weather reports leading to endless forums for individual opinions on the weather (we are ‘weather-chat’ communities). But this subjectivisation has also developed because the modern industrial lifestyle, of which weather reports are a part, is responsible for the climate: “human beings […] meet in the weather their own industrial-chemotechnical, militaristic, locomotive and tourist activities. Thanks to their billions of micro-emissions, the sum total of these activities not only changes the atmospheric balance; it also affects the global atmosphere’s composition and ‘mood.’”³ In weather, which is partly determined by technology, yet also unable to be captured by technology, we find the attempts to separate nature and culture becoming blurry.
We perhaps associate climate change with the dawn of the steam engine and the burning of fossil fuel, with pollution billowing from the smokestacks of factories borne of the industrial revolution. For Wiener, writing in the mid-twentieth century, the world was moving from ‘power engineering,’ which rose with the steam age, to ‘communication engineering’. This is the age of servomechanisms, and of feedback and control, where networks of communication and data feedback gain importance over networks of energy. Wiener was correct that automatons encased in sensors, information, coding and feedback loops would come to dominate our world.⁴
But ‘communication’ networks have led only to the massive expansion of networks of energy and power, to increased burning of fossil fuels and to ongoing planetary devastation in support of the apparent weightlessness of the ‘digital’.⁵ The main concern of a data centre isn’t data, but the management of temperature, the cooling of servers.⁶ Early computers were used for weather prediction,⁷ today they are determinants of the weather via their massive reliance on energy for both production and use.
Metaphors of ‘clouds’ and ‘liquidity’, hinted at in Francis’s installation of weather balloons, dehumidifiers and water troughs, are often used to describe this data-soaked digital world. Water has a strong metaphorical link to flows of trade and economic resources enabled by enhanced communication networks,⁸ while the contemporary metaphor of ‘cloud’ computing draws on the longer association of clouds with the accumulation of meaning, as well as their formlessness and impossible complexity.⁹ In a context of a warming planet and rising oceans, where the digital is recognised as a key determinant of the weather, ‘clouds’ and ‘liquidity’ are transmuted from benign metaphors of digital complexity to descriptions of the materiality of climate change. Connotations of this global context inhere in the materials of Francis’s work and are emphasised by the disc-shapes of the stretched weather balloons, which evoke planetary forms. Yet the effect for the viewer is much more intimate, and the work connects the global to individual experience and to arrangements of time and space inhabited by individual embodied visitors.
The balloons, cut-up and stretched over Perspex, are aged with wrinkles and imperfections caused by the effects of condensation, having been left outside to the vagaries of the Meanjin weather and its humidity and heat. The patina of colours and textures on each disc has been created by variable exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays and to unique and fortuitous distributions of moisture and heat. The specificity of the atmospheric conditions of the Outer Space gallery will determine the ongoing transformation of the texture and colour of balloon fragments as well as the volume and microbial composition of the water that drips from the dehumidifier. The imperfections, wrinkled texture and thinly stretched form of the latex gives it a skin-like quality. These forms, combined with the occasional drip of water and its slow movement along a trough, and the quiet minimalism of the space, makes the viewer acutely aware of their own body. We feel the moisture in our mouth, and the movement of the faintly cooling air across our skin and hair. We recognise that our body is at this moment, like the weather balloons, being subject to and slowly altered by the invisible radiation and slight changes in humidity that comprise the atmosphere of the gallery. This is an environment that, in turn, is being minutely altered by our presence, creating an intimacy of body and space amidst the expansive metaphorical connotations of the work.
With latex painted partly over them, the exhibition draws further attention to the already imposing windows at the front of the gallery. When do we look out, when do we look in? encourages awareness of the threshold between inside and outside, and the tactility of the climatic difference that separates these spaces. The drip of the dehumidifier makes me think of the seemingly endless traffic of the four-lanes outside the window: the exhaust fumes, the drips of condensate from air-conditioned vehicles as they sit at the traffic light just beyond the sliding doors of the gallery. Our bodies, like the weather balloons, and like our planet, become temporal sites that mediate these conditions of water, light and air.
In this context I am inspired by John Durham Peters’ expansive understanding of media: beyond images, screens and signs, ‘media’ refers to the strategies through which humans, things, animals and data are held together in time and space. As such, media includes fire, oceans and clouds alongside novels, dolphin sonar and Google searches. Francis’s work turns the weather balloon into media in this expanded sense. It moves from an accessory enabling the collection of statistical information, ¹⁰ to connecting the colliding (and mutually determining) temporalities and spatialities of our body and the atmosphere: “Media show up wherever we humans face the unmanageable mortality of our material existence: the melancholy facts that memory cannot hold up and body cannot last, that time is, at base, the merciless and generous habitat for humans and things. Media lift us out of time by providing a symbolic world that can store and process data in the widest sense of that word.” ¹¹ This is data irreducible to signs and able to cross chasms of scale between the micro of a human moment and the macro of planetary futures. Francis’s work invites us to experience the space of the gallery and our movement through this, to give weight to our breath, our temperature, our senses and our bodily presence; to recognise these as interpretive frameworks and as mutual determinants of the atmospheric conditions we inhabit, and to hold, if only for an instant, the enormity and complexity that this suggests.
1 The dehumidifier is a De’Longhi DDS30COMBI. The frames were found, being surplus remnants from other artists’ exhibitions.
2 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 1961. 2 nd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965. p.33.
3 Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air. 2002. Trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. p.86-89.
4 Wiener, p.38-43.
5 Literature on this is vast, but for succinct statement in works that have broader relevance to this essay, see: Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. London: Verso, 2022. p. 30-31); João Ribas, “Under the Clouds” in Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime Ed. João Ribas. Porto: Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, 2015. 8-27. p.17.
6 Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. p.73,79.
7 Ribas, p.15
8 See: Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form, London: Reaktion, 2016. p.12-21, 58; Veronica Strang, Water: Nature and Culture. Earth Ser. London: Reaktion, 2015. p.51-53.
9 Richard Hamblyn, Clouds: Nature and Culture. Earth Ser. London: Reaktion, 2017. p.7-11, 49, 90, 174.
10 As Wiener notes, a meteorologist isn’t interested in a ‘cloud’: “What really concerns the meteorologist is some such statistical statement as, ‘Boston: January 17, 1950: Sky 38% overcast: Cirrocumulus.” Cybernetics, p.31.
11 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. p.50.
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Kyle Weise is a writer and curator. He has a long involvement with artist-run and not-for profit spaces. Alongside independent curatorial projects, he was the Curator at Metro Arts (2018-23), a committee member at Kings ARI (2009-11) and, with long-term collaborator Simone Hine, co-founded and co-directed Screen Space (2010-16), Beam Contemporary (2010-2014) and Kuiper Projects (2017-ongoing). He currently holds positions as a Curatorial Officer at Redland Art Gallery and as Acting Curator at UQ Art Museum.