Martina O’Brien’s Quotidian: Citizen-Scientists and Centres of Calculation
Karen E. Till (1)

Martina O’Brien’s seven-channel video Quotidian takes us on a journey through interconnected temporal-spatial networks of people, technologies, and matter involved in recording our daily ‘weather’. In the sequence ‘Working in Finite Numbers’, we are introduced to the Met Éireann archives in Glasnevin, Dublin, with saturated close-up images of stacked files listing place names and dates, cardboard storage boxes, rainfall cards, humming energy lines, metal filing cabinets, old computer punch cards, and numerical sorting systems. We read that some weather stations, such as in Athy, are now closed, and are invited to contemplate the labour that went into a very thick file pulled out of a cabinet drawer labelled 1942 in thick bold letters. Later, in the sequence ‘Like Clockwork’, we see ©Storagetech robots, whirring back and forth, with lights flashing green and red as they move up and down aisles to store and update data. Their movements, when presented by three levels of moving robotics through O’Brien’s video screen spliced into seven frames, track the fast and global pace of the world’s largest numerical weather prediction digital data archive in The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.(2) The timings, pacing and contrasts between the slower pace of the human-created paper archive portrayed in the opening sequences and the fully automated ‘high end’ systems in the latter are precisely edited to communicate the transitions between human-machine pasts and futures that have created the possibilities of climate science in an age of crisis.

Throughout Quotidian, O’Brien’s vigilant camera attends to the changing social relations and technological structures of science infrastructures, as depicted by closely-focused shots of handwritten inscriptions and the flashing lights of automated digital ones. These juxtapositions remind us that what we might think we know about weather, automation and networks, needs to be rethought. Indeed, the project beautifully depicts Bruno Latour’s complex discussion about the historical emergence of scientific ‘centres of calculation’.(3) By accumulating, archiving, stabilising and re-circulating scientific data about weather, the two archives depicted in Quotidian, as significant national and global centres, are where new scientific knowledges about climate change are produced.(4) Such centres of calculation are cyborg networks, to use Donna Haraway’s terminology, that could not exist without the historical creation of well-functioning webs of people, objects, and matter.(5) Quotidian captures the range of scientific relations and movements that include intimate, personal stories tied to recording and observing weather, as well as the automated possibilities of supercomputer data storage and transfer.

Critical to the establishment of centres of climate calculation is the work of hundreds of dispersed citizen-scientists who have recorded and transmitted observations over a long period of time. 500 weather stations exist in Ireland, which are controlled by the Irish Meteorological Service - renamed Met Éireann in 1996. As in Latour’s discussion of scientific practice, citizen-scientists collecting data at these weather stations use and make research data, objects and expertise that are mobile, including instruments, recording devices, books, observations. Working independently, the scientific resources they collectively produce have been systematically connected through a simple technology: the weather observation postcard. Daily recordings are transcribed by observers to monthly data cards, are sent to Met Éireann, and from there, observations are transformed, aggregated, and connected by other scientists who produce ‘weather’ data and ‘climate’ models. Today’s scientists would not have been able to develop accurate models documenting our current climate emergency without those historical relations. Indeed, the weather-observers’ work in aggregate made possible the creation of the Island of Ireland Precipitation (IIP) network, a ‘homogeneous network of 25 monthly rainfall stations from across the island with data from 1850 to 2016’. Geographers at the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Unit (ICARUS) at Maynooth University have systematically analysed this longitudinal data to create recommendations to the Irish EPA and government authorities regarding climate futures.(6)

Quotidian gives us a sense of the magnitude of the larger centres of calculation, but the real protagonist of this series of seven videos are the hands of the weather observers. O’Brien’s camera pauses to focus on the citizen-scientists’ monthly task of transcribing weather diary data to official Met Éireann monthly rainfall measurement cards for September in Kildare County. In the sequence ‘Renderings’, close-up shots frame observers’ hands, who work systematically between and across pages of data record books, moving line by line as they fill in the daily precipitation volumes, the monthly amount, and the number of days totalling over 0.2 mm and 1.0 mm on the rainfall postcards. The pace of their dedicated work captured in this sequence, with a clock ticking in the background, allows viewers to recognise these scientists as individuals by the ways they hold their pens and pencils, flip back and forth through their pages of observations, and transfer and record the data onto the postcards. As they do so, we begin to notice their personal details, such as the rings on their fingers, the lengths of their fingernails, and the shapes of their hands.

Although there are no human faces in Quotidian, we become so entranced by these hands that we delight later on when we recognise them again in ‘Re-beginnings & Repetitions’. Unlike the former sequence, the weather observers seem to be aware of our presence, and are filmed as educators who show us their craft. They introduce us to their rain gauges that are situated in their yards and gardens, and we watch as they carefully twist off the tops of their copper measuring units to reveal a collection spout that allows the rain to drip into plastic or glass bottles (one is an empty Powers bottle and another an empty wine bottle), or a metal bucket. After taking out the rainwater, they pour it into a glass beaker which they hold to show us the mm measurement on the side. After recording the rainfall in their daily field notebooks, they slowly pour out the water, reassemble the gauge, and, for good measure, some even gently pat and caress their trusty gauges.(7)

Since 2016, O’Brien has sought to explore the multi-scalar and tangled networks of machines and humans that generate weather data, but perhaps with a clearer focus on machine, automated infrastructures, considered to be ‘high end’ systems that model future climates. The intimacy captured in Quotidian resulted from an unexpected personal journey following the artist’s work Loop Topology (2018), a project that looked at linkages between a manual rainfall station and a supercomputer in Ireland and Spain.(8) This initial research into manual stations later led her to obtain permission from Met Éireann to get the locations of the Kildare-based manual stations. After which she met the weather observers and all of whom generously agreed to share their work for Quotidian. What she discovered was that the weather observers in County Kildare, while all members of the Weather Observation Network, were “the most non-networked network” she had ever encountered: “none knew each other or were familiar with any other weather observers, even though some of them lived only a couple of fields away”.(9) While the drought of 2018 indicated the urgency of our current climate crisis, it also resulted in delays in shooting Quotidian, perhaps reminding the artist of the time needed to challenge dominant assumptions about what is meant by weather networks.

O’Brien has collaborated in the past with citizen-caretakers in climate-related projects, such as with the Dodder Anglers in Casting Territory: A Contemporary River Keepers’ Index of Lesser Known Patterns (2015) and with neighbourhood residents (including herself) negatively affected by flooding for Knitted Flood Wall (2012).(10) If O’Brien were to depict the observers’ craft only through images of the archive, the warmth and dedication of those “who regularly go out each day, rain or shine to record the weather” would have been lost, as well as the artist’s documentation of the importance of their work to climate scientists today.

Yet Quotidian is neither nostalgic nor romantic. In the second minute of ‘Working in Finite Numbers’, we move from the traditional archive to an underground corridor that changes to a split-shot image of a synoptic, fully-automated weather station, with its mechanical arms and roots above and below ground. In a later sequence, ‘Routings’, we learn that our Irish weather observers will soon be replaced by robotic Present Sensor Monitors.

But before we face our future of automation, O’Brien’s handheld, human-eye-level framing caresses the everyday environments of the current citizen-scientists work. We see, through the artist’s cine-eye,an everyday world where citizens collect data. (11) Walking now with the artist’s movements, we are introduced to seven weather stations, including the Irish Peatlands Conservation Centre, whose walls ask us to ‘Help Protect IPCC Peatlands’, backyards, gardens and greenhouses, and some flickering screens. These all slowly become replaced by CCTV footage from Met Éireann’s automated weather stations to indicate the closing down of the human stations and their replacement by the automated ones. By the end of this sequence, we get a final glimpse of a copper rain gauge in a backyard. We are left to contemplate our climate future as all the screens are ultimately replaced by Met Éireann images that slowly change from colour to black-and-white, as if they too will one day be archaic.

1 Karen E. Till is Professor of Cultural Geography and Director of the MA in Spatial Justice at Maynooth University. She is also co-founding Director of the Space&Place Research Collaborative and the Mapping Spectral Traces networks of artists, scholars, practitioners, activists and community leaders. This essay was supported by an Irish Research Council New Foundations Scheme STEAM grant. Thank you to Martina O’Brien and Lucina Russell at Kildare Arts Service for generously partnering with the Department of Geography on seminars related to Quotidian that included our undergraduate students and taught Climate Change and Geography Masters students in 2018-19. A special thank you to Gerry Kearns for his helpful suggestions to this essay. All mistakes remain those of the author.

2 The ECMWF archive in located in the UK. Ireland is a founding member.

3 Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

4 The establishment of European scientific centres of calculation are embedded in histories of colonialism and through relations of international cooperation. In Ireland, weather observations were collected through the Meteorological Committee of the British Board of Trade, which includes the first ‘real time’ weather observation transmitted from Valentia Island in Co. Kerry in 1860. The British Meteorological Office continued to collect and disseminate weather data until the Irish Meterological Service (IMS) was established in 1936. Initially providing weather information for transatlantic aviation, the IMS provided forecasts on Radio Éireann, daily newspapers and Teilifís Éireann, and opened the Central Analysis and Forecast Office in 1961. As a full member of the World Meteorological Organisation and founding member of the ECMWF and the European Meteorological Satellite Organisation (EUMETSAT), the IMS was active in creating other co-operative European agencies to develop numerical models for short-range forecasting, including EUMETNET, ECOMET, and HIRLAM. See Met Éireann webpage, ‘Our History’ https://www.met.ie/about-us/our-history#

5 Haraway's cyborgs are ‘dense material-semiotic “things”’ that can unite diffused political coalitions along lines of affinity rather than identity (Haraway, 2016, p. 204). Haraway’s 1985 ‘cyborg manifesto’ can be found in Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. A more recent discussion is in Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

6 Murphy, C., Broderick, C., Matthews, T., Noone, S. and Ryan, C. 2019. Irish Climate Futures: Data for Decision-making. EPA Research Report 277, available at: http://www.epa.ie/pubs/reports/research/climate/Reserach_Report_277.pdf. Quote from Murphy et al, 2019, p. 4.

7 As the artist’s transcripts with the observers in this volume indicate, some have inherited their rain gages through priesthoods, schools, friends or family, whereas one won a full weather stations through a national Met Éireann lottery.

8 ‘Loop Topology looks at two different data infrastructures built in the 1940s … in Dublin and …Barcelona. The video footage was recorded by the artist at both sites. The artwork explores the visibility and invisibility of climate data infrastructure. …The artwork conjures up the atmosphere of the artist’s original experience of pursuing access to these climate data assimilation and collection facilities. Kindly supported by The Arts Council of Ireland’s Travel and Training Award (2017) and Kildare County Council’s Arts Act Award (2017)’. O’Brien, Martina, Loop Topology, available at:
https://www.martinaobrien.com/loop-topology.html

9 O’Brien, Martina. 2019. Personal communication with author, August.

10 Casting Territory: A Contemporary River Keepers’ Index of Lesser Known Patterns, was a collaborative art project, which “utilized the art of fly-tying to explore the angler’s unique knowledge of flora and fauna, physical geography and role as guardians of the River Dodder” (O’Brien, Martina: https://www.martinaobrien.com/casting-territory.html). See also: Till, Karen E. 2015. ‘Fishing for the River: An Dothra Guardians in Martina O’Brien’s Casting Territory’, publication accompanying exhibitions, supported by CREATE’s Artist in the Community Scheme. Knitted Flood Wall was “developed to highlight the need for the installation of a flood defence wall. Using the Catchment Flood Risk Management Study Velocity map of the River Dodder (produced by Dublin City Council) as the pattern base and colour scheme and in collaboration with the Ballsbridge Dodder Residents Committee. When completed, this replica flood wall spanned 40ft in length × 8ft in height and took over 20 participants six months to knit. It was installed along the river at Ballsbridge, Dublin, for a period of seven days in October 2012 as a means to mark the first anniversary of the 2011 flood in that location” (O’Brien, Martina: https://www.martinaobrien.com/martinaobrien-knitted-flood-wall.html). See also: Gerry Kearns and Karen E. Till. ‘“The Wrath of the Rain”: The Lifeworlds of Irish Cultural Practice’. In Nessa Cronin and Tim Collins, Eds. Irish Lifeworlds (Cork University Press) (forthcoming).

11 Kino-Eye was developed by the experimental film artist Dziga Vertov during the 1920s in the Soviet Union. He experimented with multiple cameras from different heights, and edited these according to various film speeds, using negatives, creating split screens, and other techniques to create montages depicting everyday life that moved between human and machine perspectives. The Kino-Eye group sought to radicalise ways of depicting ‘reality’ by creating a new type of perception. See Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Edited by Annette Michelson, translated by Kevin O'Brien (University of California Press).