Light Showers and your hair is in a mess, reads the text from Jaka Železnikar‘s e-poem, though there’s no guarantee the described weather will be the same when you follow the link. Železnikar’s web piece updates a phrase by writer and painter Mateja Sever first quoted on the left embankment of the river Ljubjanica just before Tromostovje. Inspired by the original graffiti, SonÄek je in ti si skuÅ¡trana (The sun is shining and your hair is in a mess) Železnikar wrote a program that culls weather reports from that location every few hours updating the piece.
The mechanisms of the web add an elegant layer to this work, since the action of reading the quoted text and following the link evokes the same uncanny feeling as Janet Cardiff’s audio tour at PS1 in 2001. In this piece, Cardiff instructs the viewer to look through a window over looking an intersection on the street. “…The traffic light turns red*” she says, and while it may turn green when you look, it doesn’t matter; there’s still a poetic chord struck within that isolated moment of motion and change. Though Železnikar’s poem does not require a shared physical space — rather assuming the disperse locations of people across the web — the artist works with the same disjuncture between record and shared experience. For this reason, no matter what the weather, we all can identify something vaguely erotic in the suggestion that your hair is in a mess.
*not an exact quote, but more or less what she says
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