Niina Oisalo
Weather, diary of the body
Meri Kytö
Weather walking
In Venice, there is a habit of “andar sconte” (to walk hidden, Davis and Marvin 2004: 79–85). This is a tactic for the locals to avoid the hordes of tourists grazing the old city. Similarly, one seeks to walk hidden from the weather in cities when they become too warm, too cold, or too wet. Shopping malls and arcades provide shelter, air conditioning, and heating for those seeking a break from the elements.
During winter, it is customary in my hometown Tampere, Finland to walk from one sheltered passage to another, keeping the exposure to the freezing temperatures to a minimum when walking from point a to point b. These spaces are more often than not commercial, so you succumb to all the advertisement provided. Gusts of warm air drive you through the draft lobby. The scent of coffee and doughnuts overcomes the odour of wet woollen mittens.
In this field recording done during November 2019 (which you can listen to while you continue reading):
one can hear how the season represents itself in the sonic environment. I walked through the crowded shopping center Ratina, where Christmas music was just about to be added to the background music playlists of the shops. Wintery sound effects (chimes) have already been added to some voice commercials, one of which recommended getting a vaccine for the seasonal influenza at the private health care center on the 4th floor. In the middle of the shopping center, there is a Christmas shopping season opening: a happening for children, people in fluffy Moomin costumes hugging delighted kids with puffy quilted jackets.
The most common scenario of encountering sounds and music in shopping malls entails moving past loudspeakers in hallways and stores. This causes the sounds to be heard in dynamic glides, waves of intensifying and weakening sounds, momentary and random. The consumer is on the move; their experience of the music and commercials in the background is one of encountering overlapping sound sources, noticing elements that grow stronger and weaker, momentarily and randomly.
In the 1970s, soundscape researchers borrowed vocabulary from geography and landscape studies (Schafer 1977), including acoustic horizon or sound mark, to emphasize the place of sonic events. This was a novel and ecological approach at the time. However, Tim Ingold (2007: 12) suggests that our metaphors for describing soundscapes should come from meteorology, not landscape studies. In a multisensory setting, it makes sense to think of the sensory world as an atmosphere or ambiance: formed from the situational, sensorial, and practical character of perception (Thibaud 2011). The ephemeral qualities of the sensory (media) environment inside a shopping mall could also be described as flurries of sound adverts, gusts of cinnamon scent, drafts of wifi connections, and lightning flashes of illuminated advertising boards.
References:
Davis, Robert and Garry Marvin. 2004. Venice, the Tourist Maze. A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2007. “Against Soundscape”, in Autumn Leaves, edited by A. Carlyle, pp. 10–13. Paris: Double Entendre.
Thibaud, Jean-Paul. 2011. “The Sensory Fabric of Urban Ambiances”. Senses and Society 6 (2): 203-215.
Schafer, R. Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World. Toronto: MacClelland & Steward.
Song heard in the recording: Dat Zijn De Moomins, comp. by Pierre Kartner, sung by Benny Törnroos, K-TEL 1992.
Nina Grønlykke Mollerup
Freezing and drenched – sensing phones, sensing bodies
“A mindful body that knows and remembers must also live and breathe. A living, breathing body is at once a body-on-the-ground and a body-in-the-air. Earth and sky, then, are not components of an external environment with which the progressively ‘knowledged-up’ (socialized or enculturated) body interacts. They are rather regions of the body’s very existence, without which no knowing or remembering would be possible at all.” (Ingold 2010: 116).
Increasingly, our phones move with our bodies-on-the-ground/bodies-in-the-air as the ground and the air are molded with the weather.
As I move through what Tim Ingold (ibid) aptly calls the weather-world, I sense my phone with the weather as the phone senses me with the weather. Earth and sky, indeed, are not external components.
The sun is shining in Copenhagen.
I know this from looking out the window. I also know this from the icon of a sun on the weather app on my phone. As I go outside, phone in hand, my sensory engagements with my phone are unsettled by the brightness of the sun which makes it difficult for me to see the icons on my phone. In the battle of light against light, somehow light always wins.
Synchronically, I sense the sun and my phone-in-hand senses the sun – I put on my sunglasses as my phone turns up the brightness of the screen. Then I proceed to move through the weather-world, sensing phone in hand.
In Cairo, the sun knows different levels of intensity.
My phone tries to keep up its sensory engagement, brightened screen and all. Yet now the screen turns burning hot and hurts not only my eyes but also my hands as I attempt to engage with it. If I wear my sunglasses, my phone still recognizes me and allows me to access its wonder of connectivity. But without my sunglasses, my squinting eyes make my phone suspicious, unable to sense a visual likeness and accept my request for access. I shield my phone as well as myself from the sun and proceed to move through shaded spots of the weather-world, burning-hot-sensing-phone in bag.
Back in Copenhagen, it is raining. Heavily.
I can hear drops of rain against my office windows, and I see my town through the distortion of the water against the windowpane. Prepared by an icon in my weather app preceding the downpour, I move into the rain. The rain drops increase in amount and intensity as I move through the city, only partly shielded by my raincoat. My phone rings. Yet the raindrops interfere with my hands on the phone, and my phone’s perception of me seems distorted as I attempt to answer the phone. I try to write a message instead, but my phone responds with the strangest letters, sensorily bewildered, as if guided as much by the touch of water drops as by the touch of my fingers. It seems to sense both me and the drops of water, but it makes no distinction. I acknowledge I’m defeated by the rain in the battle of the sensory attention of my phone and hurry home instead. As I enter my apartment, drenched, my phone warns me: “Liquid detected”. I feel strangely connected to my phone. Later, dry and sympathetic, I take a pause in moving through the weather-world and stay on my couch, drenched-and-drying-phone on the table.
On another Copenhagen morning, the temperature is below freezing.
I get on my bike, bundled up to keep me warm in the stinging air. My phone fits nicely in my pocket and ensures I feel connected to the world as I move through it. Yet, as it rings, I sense a disconnection created by my protection from the cold. My phone does not respond to my glove-clad hands. I am happy to interrupt my bike ride to pick up the phone, but I do not want to take the gloves off to slide my fingers across the phone to answer the call. I attempt to respond, instead, with my cheek. However, despite Kytö’s (2024) assertion that you can command the screen with your nose, my attempt to find a spot of skin to slide across my phone does not serve any other purpose than to amuse a close-by pedestrian. I share the amusement and continue to move through the freezing weather-world, unsensing-phone no longer on my cheek.
In the dry and temperate comfort of my office, sheltered from the weather-world, I put my phone away to allow for a pensiveness undisrupted by profit-driven algorithms and mundane demands of everyday life.
While technological developments have certainly sped up our thinking about the sensory capabilities of media devices, it is not a new thing that media devices can sense human beings and their surroundings. Long before facial recognition technologies, the earliest daguerreotype camera devices in the 1800s functioned by sensing light. Image-producing devices have always been sensory, as have other media devices.
Hence, I contend that sensory media anthropology must not just decenter meaning-making practices in order to take into account how human beings sense media with their surroundings; it must also, importantly, take into account how media devices sense human beings and – or with – their surroundings. And it must pay attention to how media devices sense human beings differently (Mollerup 2024).
References:
Ingold, Tim. 2010. “Footprints Through the Weather-world: Walking, Breathing, Knowing”, in Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Minds, Bodies and Environment, edited by Trevor Marchand, pp. 115–132. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
Mollerup, Nina G. 2024. “Skin”. This volume.
Kytö, M. “Electricity”. This volume.
