UNI Fall 2026: Weather Commons

Weather Commons is a UNI module dedicated to the cultural, technological, and mythological histories of weather modification 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, five 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.

The full program, along with the registration process, will be released on September 1, 2026.