Spending much of our lives connected digitally, we are as affected by the 'weather' on the Internet as in the sky. “Whithervanes” tracks the orchestration of fear in real time through monitoring newsfeeds for alarmist keywords. The five headless chicken weathervanes revolve away from the geographic origin of each story, indicating the intensity of fear through changing colored lighting and the number of rotations each “Whithervane” makes. The image of the headless chicken perfectly expresses the sense of panic that corporations, governments and the media use to keep consumer-citizens acquiescent. Originally commissioned by the Creative Foundation, Ltd. for the 2014 Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone Artworks has now acquired two as part of their permanent collection. “Whithervanes” will have its US premiere in Miami with Locust Projects in 2017. “Whithervanes” is also part of the international Neo-Nomad Project (an initiation of SAPAR Contemporary Gallery + Incubator, NYC) curated by Basak Senova.

rootoftwo always starts working at the level of systems - the chicken-shaped, physical objects are just a small part of that. The project is made up of hardware, software, mechanics and electronics. People are part of it too - the journalists in the field, the people on the street in Folkestone, and the people that simply find the website and press the #keepcalm or #skyfalling buttons to influence the ambient amount of prevailing fear. To us, it is an informatic system - a network of sensors and actuators that responds to data. The chickens are like a blinking light on the dashboard of your car - they are there to let you know that something, somewhere is not quite as it should be, and it needs your attention.

We plan to launch “Whithervanes” as an open-source hardware kit - to put the entire software and mechanical systems we have developed in the hands of different groups as a platform to be modified and re-purposed for different locations and for different streams of data. "Big data" really isn't visible unless you are looking for it. However, it is hard to ignore a headless chicken (or some other totem) that is being 'blown around' by an invisible hand and changing color. We imagine any number of other groups and individuals could build on this system to make evident a variety of concerns.