Engaging with plankton

Jana Thierfelder

If you enter a natural body of water you are not alone. No, you are surrounded by millions of little creatures, namely Plankton. Plankton are minuscule organisms that drift in water, including oceans, lakes, and rivers. They can be microscopic or slightly larger and are classified into phytoplankton (plant-like, producing oxygen through photosynthesis) and zooplankton (animal-like, feeding on other organisms). From a biodiversity perspective, they are a crucial part of aquatic food chains, supporting marine life. From a science perspective they can be indicators for water quality which again indicates for shifts in the ecosystem. Plankton defies easy classification: Unlike taxonomic categories based on genetic or evolutionary lineage, “plankton” is a transversal descriptor, uniting vastly different organisms by a shared condition: drifting. This movement-defined category crosses biological kingdoms, blurring lines between plants, animals, and other life forms. In this sense, plankton queers categorisations and binarities. Ecologically, plankton plays a crucial role: it forms the base of food webs and regulates global carbon cycles. As such, plankton are sensitive indicators of environmental change. In a projectweek, artists from Zurich University of the Arts collaborated with experts on plankton from Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology). The exchange offered gaining a deeper understanding of the creatures that surround us when we swim, for example in Lake Zurich or the Limmat. A documentation of the results of the artistic encounters with plankton are made availeable in this exhibition. The projects in this exhibition emerged from a collaboration between Zurich University of the Arts, Master in Transdisciplinary Studies, and Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Research. Participating artists: Anna-Tia Buss, Julia Dorsch, Anna Lena Eggenberg, Micol Favini, Luisa Kühne, Ke Ren, Leila Saad, Domenico Shadlou. Facilitators / Hosts: Patrick Müller, Marta Reyes, Jana Thierfelder. Guests: Francesco Pomati, Riikka Tauriainen.

The Plankton project interprets meteorological data from the Lake of Greifensee in a poetic, non-scientific way.

Each technical parameter becomes a gesture, a rhythm, a visual presence.

The goal is not to represent reality, but to listen to the data as if they were living organisms. Plankton is a symbol of fragility and adaptation, a body that responds to the invisible climate. Wind, temperature, rain, and pressure are transformed into signs, textures, and movements.

Each numerical value is accepted in its uniqueness, without averaging or abstraction. The composition changes like a sensitive ecosystem, in constant evolution. The interface allows you to travel through the years as landscapes of variation. The data becomes visual material, a perceptual experience, not information.

The system uses a JSON-formatted weather data archive that collects information such as temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, and other atmospheric values for each day of 2020. When the user selects a date, the JavaScript code reads the file, locates the corresponding entry, and extracts the data. Each parameter is then translated into a visual element: the average temperature determines which font will be used, the wind direction determines the orientation of the numbers, and the wind speed modifies their spacing and rhythm. All values are drawn on an HTML5 canvas, where each digit finds a random position consistent with the weather conditions of the chosen day. In this way, each composition becomes a graphic trace of the climate, a typographic landscape in which scientific data is transformed into signs, movement, and form.

The work is built using web languages—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—and reads climate data from a file called data.json. When the page is opened, the JavaScript code queries this file to obtain information for the selected day, such as temperature, wind speed, and wind direction, and transforms it into a visual composition generated in real time on the canvas. Each number, rotated and arranged according to the weather data, becomes a typographic trace of that day's climate.

Since the browser does not allow local files to be read for security reasons, the work must be launched through a small server called Live Server in order to function. This local server simulates a real website and allows the code to communicate correctly with the data.json file.

To activate it, simply open the project folder with an editor such as Visual Studio Code, install the Live Server extension, and open the index.html file with the “Open with Live Server” option. The browser will then display the work in operation, with the option to select dates and see the climate data transformed into typographic forms. Alternatively, the folder can be uploaded to an online platform, such as GitHub Pages or Netlify, where the installation will work automatically, ready to be explored by anyone.

Domenico Shadlou

https://github.com/garilsa/data_visualization_Greifensee_engaging_with_Plankton

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Jana Thierfelder, Patrick Müller - Engaging with plankton - 2025