The Weather Has Been Cancelled: Identity Difference in Climate Models mit Jasmijn Visser

In the organizer's words:

The Weather Has Been Cancelled: Identity Difference in Climate Models

Lecture-Performance with Jasmijn Visser

This performance lecture and game demonstration by Jasmijn Visser centers on the idea of identity difference in digital twins. Drawing on General Modelling Theory (GMT) to explore digital twin technologies, Visser observes that the model, in creating a representation of the world, takes on its own distinctive symbolic system and building blocks, as well as its own internal logic, becoming an entity in its own right. This creates a key tension: we turn to the digital model to understand ourselves, while simultaneously adapting to the appearance of this twin as new being within our midst.

Presenting a speculative cultural climate model, an interactive fiction artwork called The weather has been cancelled (TWHBC), Visser appropriates the digital twin's primary narration of mitigating climate crisis to explore these tensions. In the digital environment of TWHBC, the disappearance of the weather is staged to expose the asymmetry between weather and climate: attention actively shifts from the familiar, lived experience of weather to the abstract and diffuse condition of climate change. Meteorological models render such diffuse phenomena legible, whilst inevitably simplifying their complexity. In building an abstract, distant world of changing averages and global thresholds, such modelling captures only a fraction of how this ecological disaster affects the lives of humans and other species culturally. Looking through the lens of such cultural modelling, our disrupted weather patterns create a sense of disorientation or an onsite displacement: the feeling of remaining in the same location while the environment drastically changes around you. In TWHBC the model becomes a being in its own right, acting upon others according to its own disorienting logic.

The development of The weather has been canceled was supported by Creative Industries Fund and The Meertens Institute. Concept development is supported by Cultural Climate Models, CREAM Westminster University London, & the Rachel Carson Center Munich.

Part of AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital Twins and Data Doppelgangers, May 22 & 23, 2026.

Location: Safi Faye Hall

In English with simultaneous translation into German