Theo Triantafyllidis' Funny Weather drifts across Aviva Studios' Media Wall

The Media Wall in the Social, the public foyer at Manchester's Aviva Studios, is about to become a second sky. Funny Weather, Theo Triantafyllidis's new live simulation, opens there November 11 and runs through December 6, then returns January 19 to March 26, 2027. It pulls real-time atmospheric data and recent local bird sightings into what the artist calls an AI Oracle, bespoke generative tech hosted on site, so quiet cloud formations roll into epic sunsets and migrating flocks become colorful kites. No two visits show the same sky.

In the test footage from the install, Triantafyllidis calls Funny Weather "a performative system" that reads the weather, the flights overhead and recent bird sightings in the area to "come up with some forecasts, both for the weather and about humanity." It is, he says, "a work about weather becoming the main character in our lives in the next decades." On screen, the view is the sky as if seen from the grass or a rooftop, built in layers: a cloud system that keeps changing through the day, flocks of birds running their own patterns, and a layer of kites that adds a human touch, which he treats "as a more painterly canvas." In the press release, he says the piece is "less about climate itself" than about how climate is perceived and narrated, "and about sexy airplanes."

Factory International frames the piece as a forecast for a world changing faster than can be predicted, climate uncertainty rendered as ambient spectacle. That has been Triantafyllidis's move for a decade: use the logic of play, and the engines games built, on ecological collapse and social entanglement. We covered Feral Metaverse at Frieze London this month, after the Frieze London Artist Award, and the live-sim practice goes back to the real-time performances we wrote about in 2016.

Funny Weather is the first commission from Behind the Screen, a network Factory International is launching with ACMI in Melbourne, Onassis ONX and M+ in Hong Kong to develop screen-based digital art. After Manchester, it travels to Onassis ONX in Athens and New York, to M+ in Hong Kong, where it will run on the museum's LED facade, and to ACMI in Melbourne, with each venue feeding in its own local data. M+ and ACMI are set for autumn 2027. Triantafyllidis gives an artist talk at Aviva Studios on opening day.