June 27th, 2018
7pm
Salon of former Palais Dürckheim, Cranachstraße 47, Weimar

Episodes in the Media History of the Weather Lecture by John Durham Peters

The history of human interaction with weather is also a history of cultural techniques and media technologies. Dramatists and divines have sought meaning from atmospheric events. Reading the skies is one paradigm case of human-nature interaction, and studying weather can stand in as part for whole as an inquiry into the environments humans have made or unmade. The history of modern weather is the history of the militarization of the sky and oceans, and is co-extensive with the history of modern telecommunications and computation. Weather, that eternal elusive object whose meaning we cannot leave alone, brings us close to the nature of time, and thus is an preeminent topic for media studies.