Tropical Depression is a documentary film installation that follows the 2023-2024 tropical cyclone season in the southern hemisphere. The film follows 21 different cyclones over the course of 5 months as they make their ways across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, comparing these “natural” phenomena with the historical, contemporary and speculative practice of weather manipulation and hurricane seeding. The film draws on a range of visual sources, including found footage and webcams, but most singularly footage taken from within the game Microsoft Flight Simulator, where such tropical storms are generated in realtime using live data from weather stations across the world. This is combined with text elements composed primarily of scientific weather reports taken from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, an arm of the US Navy. Presented as an installation over three channels, the work seeks not so much to draw attention to the effects of climate change on tropical storms but rather to explore the aesthetic implications of documentary filmmaking that uses not lens-based but pure data-generated imagery.

This project has taken place with the generous support of the Fonds für Forschung und Transfer, as well as the Preis für künstlerische Forschung, from the Film University Babelsberg-Konrad Wolf in Potsdam, Germany.

Credits

Director/Cinematography: Alexander Walmsley

Montage: Merit Giesen

Sound: Eleni-Ira Panourgia