Ray Chong

Each panel button — associated with a different city — triggers an audio interface describing the conditions of a day 100 years before this future society’s time on June 13th, 1973. The clips paint a picture of how society has transformed during cities’ struggles with the consequences of run-away climate change. As each report continues, LED strips behind the acrylic window play one of three animations: a sunny, cloudy, or stormy day. Ultrasonic mist atomisers hidden within the body of the structure also come alive, serving either to obscure the window with fog or to bathe the user in a humid shower from above.

Created with Teensy 4 microcontroller and Audio Shield, LED strips, ultrasonic mister atomisers, wires, breadboards, audio speakers, engraved birch plywood, clear acrylic sheets

The control panel also functions as an atlas that simultaneously visualises past and future conditions on Earth; Direct engraving on the wood represents shorelines from 1973 and is overlaid by pieces of transparent acrylic that trace both the predicted encroaching of the oceans and potential belt of life-threatening heat over the equator. Names of major cities today that could one day be abandoned, ominously dot this same map. 

Forecast purposefully straddles the line between optimistic and pessimistic visions of the future. As some level of consequential climate change progressively becomes our inevitable reality, people of the future must somehow make the best of the world we leave them. 

Yet, it also emphasises the time we have left; perched within the limbo between 2073 and 1973 with 50 years to go, today remains the best time we have to shape our destiny for the better. 

Modelled by Irene Liakhovenko