Digital media, Interactive installation/ Dutch Design Week 2022 @ Evoluon
Accepting the reality of climate change is not simply a matter of scientific understanding. Data on rising sea levels, temperature shifts, and ecosystem collapse is abundant, yet it often remains abstract and detached from our everyday lives and sensory experience. This project begins precisely at that gap. How can vast environmental data be translated into bodily and emotional experience?
Current Mood responds to this disconnection by using technology not as the cause of the problem, but as a mediator. The project connects to an online database that collects real-time, high-resolution marine data from weather buoys installed in the waters off Scheveningen. Updated every hour, wave height data functions as a tether between the sea and the bodies of people living on land.
The work invites viewers to momentarily step out of their busy routines, observe the state of the sea, and reflect on their own condition. Just as ocean waves are constantly shifting, human emotions are unstable and responsive to external forces. Through the act of observing the sea’s “mood,” Current Mood proposes a sensory reorientation of one’s bodily and emotional state. The movement of waves is not explained but felt; by attuning themselves to its rhythm, viewers become aware of how their breath, tension, and attention respond to environmental conditions. This experience is less about interpreting emotions and more about sensing the conditions under which emotions arise.
Behind the scenes
Project Current Mood is connected to an online database with live high-resolution marine data from weather buoys located at Scheveningen. Real-time wave height is updated every hour and provides a tether between the seawater and the city’s inhabitants on land.
In retrospect
In retrospect, Current Mood acknowledges the growing distance that technology can create between humans and the natural environment, while simultaneously recognizing that technology has become inseparable from contemporary life. From screens and data infrastructures to domestic machines and media consumption, technological systems are embedded in the most ordinary layers of daily existence. Within this reality, the complete removal of technology is neither realistic nor desirable.
Rather than positioning technology as an antagonist, Current Mood explores how it might function as a mediator. The project leverages real-time marine data not to optimize, predict, or control nature, but to slow perception and redirect attention. By transforming live wave data into a sensory signal, the work asks how technology might be used to reframe our relationship with the environment, not through efficiency or extraction, but through attunement.
This approach shifts the project beyond problem-solving and toward an ethical inquiry. Current Mood considers what it means to listen before acting, to observe environmental conditions before responding to them. In this sense, the project operates as a preparatory space, where bodily awareness, restraint, and sensitivity are foregrounded.
Seen from this perspective, Current Mood functions as a conceptual and sensory threshold toward embodied environmental knowledge. It anticipates practices such as those of the ‘haenyeo’, who read the sea, their bodies, and the limits of breath before entering the water. By remaining in the moment just before immersion, the project cultivates the conditions for sensing limits, rhythms, and dependencies between human bodies and the sea.
Rather than offering solutions, Current Mood proposes a shift in orientation. It suggests that in an era shaped by climate crisis and technological saturation, the capacity to slow down, to listen, and to attune oneself to environmental signals may itself be a critical form of knowledge, and a necessary starting point for more ethical ways of inhabiting the world.
Dutch Design Week 2022 x Next Nature