Although sound is the central medium of Synesthetic Weather, the project’s “emotional climates” rely heavily on multisensory elements such as light, airflow, temperature, and spatial density. This section focuses on atmospheric installation artists who have had the most profound influence on the work, including Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell.

Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project is arguably the conceptual origin point of this installation. In that work, Eliasson transforms Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into an “artificial weather system,” demonstrating how light, fog, and temperature can construct emotionally charged spaces. The installation proposes a critical idea: atmosphere itself can become the primary artistic subject. Similarly, Your Blind Passenger, with its dense fog and colour-saturated environment, allows visitors to lose and rediscover themselves within a blurred perceptual field—an approach that deeply influenced the fog-based, disorienting ambience of the Confusion zone in my project.

James Turrell, by contrast, creates “emotional light” through the materiality of illumination, slow transitions, and immersive colour fields. Works such as Aten Reign and the Skyspace series evoke calmness and meditative absorption. These strategies informed my design of the Sadness and Calm zones, where homogenised light sources and slowly shifting colour temperatures generate atmospheres of emotional descent and quiet introspection without relying on explicit narrative cues.

What unites Eliasson and Turrell is their shared understanding that light is not used to illuminate, but to construct sensation. The colors in Synesthetic Weather—the red of Anger, the cool blue of Sadness, the blue-green of Calm, and the diffuse white fog of Confusion—are therefore chosen according to atmospheric logic rather than symbolic representation.

Air and temperature also function as crucial sensory media. The strong winds in the Anger zone draw inspiration from environmental wind installations, using pressure and directional force to elicit visceral bodily reactions. The gentle fog and directionless airflow in the Confusion zone derive from Eliasson’s fog-based strategies, cultivating perceptual uncertainty. Meanwhile, the warm, soft breeze in the Calm zone is influenced by sensory principles found in natural meditative environments.