The Prediction Machine is an interactive artwork that marks ‘moments of climate change’ in our everyday lives, tracked and recorded by a machine that prints out predictions based on end of the pier fortune telling machines. The predictions and videos on the screen are devised by participants in workshops that take place alongside the exhibition. Next to it stands the Promises Machine inviting you to write your own promise or wish for the future, and find out more about the science behind the predictions.

The Prediction Machine has been created by Rachel Jacobs, in collaboration with Matt Little, Ian Jones (Sherwood Wood), Matthew Gates, Robin Shackford, Juliet Robson, Dr Candice Howarth, Prof Rob Wilby and Dr Carlo Buontempo, Lucy Veale, Upesh Mistry, Thomas Steffen, Chris Sweetman, Stephen Flood and John Barton, and participants in all of the parallel workshops. Developed with the ‘Performing Data’ research team and Dominic Price at the Mixed Reality Lab/Horizon Digital Economy Research, University of Nottingham. With financial support from the Arts Council of England, University of Nottingham, EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account, EPSRC, RCUK and Radar LU Arts.

The Prediction Machine concept was originally developed as part of the Relate (Timestreams) project, through an activity that involved making ‘climate change empanadas’, that acted as fortune cookies based on different CO2 emission scenarios taken from the IPCC’s research.  A first version of the artwork was exhibited at Barracao Maravilha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2013.  The Prediction Machine returned to Brazil as part of the Tropixel Festival in Ubatuba in 2015.

https://www.thepredictionmachine.org/