UNI Fall 2026: Weather Commons
On the Practice and Politics of Atmospheric Modification
14 October – 23 November 2026
In its new edition, TBA21–Academy’s para-academic program UNI investigates how the atmosphere is being reshaped—technically, politically, and culturally. Through seminar sessions and working group, this platform for collective learning and experimentation creates space to investigate the blind spots and less-visible territories that conventional academic and cultural frameworks often leave unaddressed.
In its Fall 2026 module, entitled Weather Commons and curated by FAST (Eva Franch i Gilabert and José Luis de Vicente) and TBA21–Academy (Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa and Aleksandra Czerniak), UNI delves into the cultural, technological, and mythological histories of weather modification.
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. Participants will explore weather-making’s genealogies and mythologies with Sarah Strauss; warfare and weather imperialism with Ala Roushan, Charles Stankievech, and Karolina Sobecka; the infrastructures and politics of atmospheric observation with Lucia Rebolino and Luiza Crosman; ways of territorial and planetary scale design with Elise Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari, and Design Earth; the limits of—and alternatives to—existing atmospheric governance frameworks with Manon Simon; and how data and simulations turn weather into a field of operations with Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Boone Mercado, who lead the collaborative Working Group.
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.