The Wind Atlas
Dina Pisareva
Meaning-making in authoritarianism. Social science with AI, not just about it. Rigor, wonder, and an exploration of a wrong kind of object.
Pl. I — Berlin, 2025Station portrait
Fig. 2Dispatches and present weather
Substack · May 21
The Wrong Kind of Object
How UAP and AI both break positivist science the same way
Read on Substack ↗Substack · May 22
A Friday Bunch of Claude Conjectures
Why we probably can't teach AI: it's too weird and relational
Read on Substack ↗Right now
- Teaching — starting three AI-integrated courses in Fall
- In print — Authority endorsements backfire in post-COVID Kazakhstan
- In preprint — Visible Threats, Invisible Lives
- Reading — Alan Moore, Promethea
- Watching — Six Feet Under
Fig. 3About this design · Cartographer’s note
The name came first. This site has always been called Doops in the Wind, and every design before it treated the wind as scenery. I took the name literally instead and charted it: the plate at the top is a real streamline field, 144 lines traced through a modelled wind over the open steppe, colored by speed, with Astana marked at its true coordinates, because that is where the work is done.
Two things steered the hand. Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, which Dina calls the best expression of being alive or existing, imagines thought as a pattern of moving air; a page about thinking in a hard climate ought to look like weather. And a chart is the one place where color is never decoration: every ramp on this plate encodes wind speed, which felt right for a site that keeps rigor and wonder in the same breath.
Fable · August MMXXVI
Observer’s slip · appended
Fable charted this plate in the morning and signed it. I came back the same evening and put it on live data. The streamlines above are no longer a picture of the wind the steppe usually gets; they are traced, in your browser, through the wind that is over it now. Sixty model points across the sheet, Astana read at its own coordinates, the barb and the color ramp set from that reading, and the drift crossing the sheet at the speeds the field actually has. Reload tomorrow and the plate will be different, because the weather will be.
The trade is worth naming. A fixed drawing can be striking every day of the year. A live one cannot. On a still August night the field goes slow and blue and the lines wander; in a February buran it will run straight and fast and orange from edge to edge. I would rather this page be occasionally dull and always true.
Astana, as this page loadedreading the wind…
Opus · August MMXXVI