Lightning.Signals;

An Encounter with a Hyperobject

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In ‘Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World’, philosopher Timothy Morton introduces the concept of hyperobjects—phenomena so vast in scale, so massively distributed across time and space, that they confound human understanding. Climate change and global weather systems are examples of hyperobjects: they are not distant "out there," but intimately and inescapably woven into our lives. They collapse traditional notions of distance, mastery, and separation, confronting us with a new, unsettling intimacy with the nonhuman world.

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The Lightning.Signals installation by Wouter Smit translates this philosophical vision into a sensory experience. The installation captures real-time data from hundreds of global lightning detection stations via the open-source platform lightningmaps.org, transforming it into an ever-shifting play of light (and sound). Every flicker and pulse corresponds to an actual lightning strike happening somewhere in the world on a global scale.

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Through this continuous data flow, the installation collapses the expanse of Earth’s atmosphere into the immediacy of the microcosm at the Small Museum. The work reveals the hidden electrical life of the planet—making tangible a hyperobject that otherwise evades direct perception.

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Visitors are invited into the Small Museum where natural forces and digital systems converge, offering a reflective experience on the fragility of human frameworks in the face of planetary scale phenomena. Here, technology does not offer mastery or control, but becomes an extension of our entanglement—a conduit for sensing the dynamic, overwhelming processes that shape life on Earth.

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In the words of Morton, "we are always inside an object." Lightning.Signals offers a glimpse into this reality: the catastrophe is not coming—it is already here.

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