EVENT: ALEXANDER WALMSLEY (APRIL 17-30 2026)
Tropical Depression
3-channel video installation, 31 min 20 sec, Germany, 2025
created by Alexander Walmsley
Across three synchronised screens, Tropical Depression enacts a peculiar form of planetary witnessing: the life and death of twenty-one cyclones that swept through the southern hemisphere during the 2023–2024 tropical season. What the viewer confronts, however, is not documentary footage in any conventional sense. Much of the film’s visual substance is drawn from within Microsoft Flight Simulator, a commercial video game whose atmospheric engine ingests live meteorological data from weather stations across the globe, rendering violent storms in real time as photorealistic, yet entirely computational, spectacle. These passages sit in uneasy tension with found footage, webcam feeds, and fragments of bureaucratic text sourced from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, the storm-tracking arm of the US Navy. The work refuses the catastrophism that characterises so much climate-crisis imagery. Instead, Walmsley positions the cyclone as an epistemological test case: a phenomenon whose representation has migrated from the optical to the algorithmic, from the camera lens to the climate model. The game engine, designed for leisure and escapism, becomes an unlikely instrument of climatological inquiry, collapsing the distinction between simulation and record, between entertainment software and scientific infrastructure. Tropical Depression is, ultimately, a film about what it means to see a storm when seeing is no longer photographic.
Alexander Walmsley is a filmmaker, media artist and researcher whose practice interrogates the image of the earth at the precise moment it is being remade by computational logic. Working across moving image, photography and interactive media, his work occupies an unstable zone between the documentary and the simulated, the scientific and the aesthetic. Walmsley’s intellectual formation is unusually hybrid: trained in Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and the University of Geneva, he came to art through the practice of digital reconstruction before that curiosity about spatial representation migrated into a sustained artistic inquiry. He is currently a lecturer and artistic PhD candidate at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam, where his research examines computational complexity and what he terms ‘earth simulations’, i.e., the video games, climate simulations, digital twins, and virtual globes through which the planet increasingly knows and pictures itself. His published work draws on a genealogy of artists who articulate the relationship between temporality and environment across media, placing works such as Tropical Depression and Landing Sites in dialogue with Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, James Benning’s 13 Lakes, and David Claerbout’s Olympia. His work has been presented at the 59th Venice Biennale (Albanian Pavilion, commissioned artist), the Daejeon Biennale of Arts and Sciences, Sharjah Art Foundation, Ars Electronica, The Photographers’ Gallery, Tirana Art Lab, and Athens Digital Art Festival. He was shortlisted for the Deloitte Photo Grant (2023) and the Istanbul 212 Photography Prize (2021).