Imminent, Rising, Becoming Severe.
A new work by art collective And If Not Now, The Forecast is an immersive installation which transports you into a mesmerising vision of the future. View the film here.
Rising sea levels are going to have a catastrophic impact on everyone in the near future, most adversely affecting those least able to deal with it. The chance to take concerted, immediate action has been squandered.
Our response is to make a direct emotional connection between the rising sea and everyday life. The idea is a simple one. A camera obscura will project real-time moving images of the sea into interiors along the coast, places in imminent danger from rising seas. These images will accompany a swelling and receding soundscape and a Shipping Forecast from the future.
A camera obscura is a darkened chamber with a small hole through which an image of the outside world is projected into the room. The ever-changing, ethereal moving images provide a heightened sense of a world outside which we cannot see but which intrudes into our limited view.
This image will cover the room and its contents, but due to inversion caused by the camera obscura, the sea will be above our heads. This is a direct metaphor for what we face in the near future. The vision created is a beautiful, painterly one, but the message it conveys is a shocking prophecy of what is to come.
Running for over a hundred years, the Shipping Forecast is a BBC Radio transmission of weather reports for the seas around the British Isles. While being a matter of life and death for seafarers, the familiar rhythm of the Shipping Forecast is a source of comfort and reassurance to those on land who believe they are not at risk from the unpredictible savagery of the sea.
Our forecast, spoken in local dialect, will report on future sea locations: The well-known sea regions of the traditional broadcast such as Viking and Cromarty will be replaced by onshore locations such as Bergen and Fraserburgh, places that will soon be underwater.
Reflecting the unseen, The Forecast is a portal into the future, an immersive experience of haunting purity and an unsettling meditation on simple truth.
And If Not Now 