The Seminar Series is the public learning strand of Weather Commons.

The seminars will run online from October 14 to November 10, 2026, 6–7:30pm CET. Each 90 mins session combines presentations and conversations with guest speakers, followed by collective discussion with the group, allowing diverse forms of expertise and experience to enter into dialogue.

Across five weekly online sessions, invited artists, historians, scientists, designers, researchers, and policy experts will explore how humans have sought to understand, predict, modify, and govern the weather—from vernacular practices, rainmaking rituals, and early experiments in weather control to satellite observation, climate modelling, geoengineering, and other forms of planetary intervention.

Each seminar combines presentations by invited guests with conversation and collective discussion, creating a space in which different disciplines, geographies, forms of knowledge, and lived experiences can meet. No single disciplinary background is required: participants are invited to approach weather through architecture, art, science, technology, politics, history, ecology, or other fields of inquiry.

Program

Session 1 — October 14, 2026
Genealogies and Mythologies of Weather Modification
With Sarah Strauss
Moderated by Eva Franch i Gilabert (FAST)           

Session 2 — October 21, 2026
Warm Wars and Weather Imperialism 
With Ala Roushan & Charles Stankievech, Karolina Sobecka
Moderated by Aleksandra Czerniak

Session 3 — October 26, 2026
Scopic Regimes of Weather
With Lucia Rebolino, Luiza Crossman
Moderated by Eduardo Castillo Vinuesa

Session 4 — November 3, 2026
Remaking the Sky
With Design Earth, Elise Hunchuck and Marco Ferrari
Moderated by Jose Luis de Vicente (FAST)

Session 5 — November 10, 2026
Atmospheric Governance
With Manon Simon, followed by discussion with the curatorial team and special guest

Sessions are open to all upon registration and fee, hosted online, and no prior expertise is required, just curiosity and longing for knowledge exchange. 
→ READ THE OPEN CALL AND REGISTER TO ATTEND

Working Group is the collaborative research and experimental practice strand of Weather Commons. Led by researchers and architects Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Boone Mercado, it brings together a small interdisciplinary group of approximately twelve practitioners selected through this international open call.

Conceived less as a conventional workshop than as a temporary research laboratory, the Working Group offers participants the opportunity to exchange tools, methodologies, and forms of expertise while developing a shared investigation into the technologies, contested claims, and political imaginaries surrounding weather modification.

The central inquiry and working method will be shaped collectively by Farzin Lotfi-Jam and the selected participants. The outcome is deliberately open-ended: it may take the form of a final presentation, a digital tool or interface, a shared research resource, an experimental prototype, or another format emerging from the process. Elements of the research may subsequently contribute to the Weather Commons publication or to a future public event.

Realtime Weather

Over the course of four sessions, participants will critically explore spatial-temporal datasets and models to investigate how environments are and have been monitored, modeled, forecast, and managed in realtime. Combining historical research with data modeling and time-based visualization, we will reconstruct and simulate these practices to examine their social and political consequences. Participants will use a novel AI-assisted software development framework to work with environmental datasets and develop experimental visualizations, simulations, interfaces, and other forms of spatial research.

Activation dates: November 5–November 23, 2026
Schedule: Thursdays, 18:00–20:30 CET
Format: Four online sessions
Independent work: Approximately 10 hours
Number of participants: Approximately 12
Platform: Zoom
Participation fee: None—all places are fully funded
Application deadline: October 4, 2026
Notification of acceptance: October 19, 2026

The Working Group will run online over the course of four sessions from November 2 to November 23, 2026, 6–8pm CET. The Working Group program requires 100% attendance and is free of charge.

→ READ THE OPEN CALL AND APPLY TO JOIN

The program contributors, participants and the working group will collaborate on a shared publication, first released on Ocean-Archive.org and later as a physical edition.

Coming soon.

UNI: Weather Commons
On the Practice and Politics of Atmospheric Modification
October 14, 2026–November 23, 2026

Weather Commons is a TBA21–Academy UNI module dedicated to the cultural, technological, and mythological histories of weather modification co-curated by FAST (Eva Franch i Gilabert and José Luis de Vicente) and TBA21–Academy (Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa and Aleksandra Czerniak).

From rainmaking rituals, anti-hail infrastructures, and cloud seeding to weather militarization, atmospheric simulation, AI forecasting, and geoengineering, the semester examines how societies have imagined, manipulated, governed, and contested the weather not as an immutable force, but as a field of intervention, power, and possibility. Placed between myth and science, emergency and speculation, care and control, weather modification occupies an unstable territory where the possible, the factual, and the conspiratorial often overlap.

At the center of the semester is a question of design and governance: if the atmosphere is a commons, who has the right to change the weather?

Across five Seminar sessions, four design blocks developed through a collaborative Working Group, and a new publication, Weather Commons brings together artists, historians, scientists, designers, policy experts, and community actors to explore the atmosphere as a shared but unevenly governed space. The semester moves from vernacular practices and histories of weather control to contemporary debates on Earth observation, climate intervention, atmospheric governance, and planetary-scale design.

Rather than asking only whether weather modification works, Weather Commons asks what worlds it produces: who benefits, who is exposed to risk, who gives consent, who has access to data, and what forms of accountability are needed when weather becomes a site of intervention.

There are two ways to engage during this term: to register for the Seminars and/or apply for the Working Group.

UNI is TBA21-Academy’s para-academic program for collective learning, knowledge production, and experimentation at the intersection of art, science, technology, and society. Conceived as a platform to explore the complexities of contemporary worlds and their ecologies, it creates space to investigate the blind spots, uncomfortable questions, and less visible territories that conventional academic and cultural frameworks often leave unaddressed. By bringing different forms of knowledge and practice into dialogue, UNI seeks to develop the pedagogies, shared languages, methods, and tools required to engage with some of these pressing yet overlooked topics.

TBA21–Academy UNI draws on the methodology developed within the OCEAN / UNI learning initiatives between 2020 and 2026.

TBA21–Academy is TBA21’s research and advocacy arm, fostering deeper relationships with the Earth’s hydrosphere and its extended ecologies through the lens of art to activate new forms of care and collective action. Operating as an incubator for collaborative inquiry, research-based artistic production, and environmental advocacy, the Academy works through exhibitions, commissions, fieldwork, residencies, pedagogical programs, and assemblies, and catalyzes new forms of knowledge emerging from exchanges between art, science, policy, and civic engagement

FAST is a transdisciplinary creative platform dedicated to addressing current and future planetary challenges through the convergence of culture, technology, architecture, art, and design. As a strategic unit, architecture studio, and R&D lab, we imagine and materialize hybrid, wide ranging experiences and projects responding and anticipating the rapidly shifting conditions of the 21st century. Founded by Eva Franch i Gilabert + Jose Luis De Vicente.  
 

UNI: Weather Commons Inquiries
hello@tba21-academy.org


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