The Ruskin Twitter Bot Project
Ruskin said ‘the sky is for all; … and yet we never make it a subject of thought’. For COP26, The Ruskin and Ben Wills-Eve, developed a conversational Twitter bot as part of his PhD, to pilot new models of digital engagement post-pandemic.
This project aimed to explore whether new digital tools like social media bots are useful for museums, and their virtual visitors, especially during times of increased virtual access, such as following the Covid-19 pandemic. Social bots are automated social media accounts that can share information with users via tweets and interact with them through scripted replies. The portfolio of images selected and accompanying scripts for this case study explores Ruskin’s views of the skies: from experimental studies to aerial perspective, to the first signs of climate change.
Ruskin said ‘the sky is for all; … and yet we never make it a subject of thought’. His drawings and paintings of the sky bridged new scientific understanding of the flux of atmospheric elements, and new forms of experimental image-making.
Ruskin’s first love was the natural world, and it was through his writing on ‘truth to nature’ that he turned to art criticism. The project that became the five volumes of Modern Painters began as a defence of the landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, ‘the father of modern art’.
Ruskin describes Turner’s trailblazing skies: ‘It is a painting of the air, something into which you can see, through the parts which are near you, into those which are far off; something which has no surface, and through which we can plunge far and farther, and without stay or end, into the profundity of space’.
Ruskin wrote, ‘Attention to the real form of clouds, and careful drawing of effects of mist … becomes a subject of science with us; and the faithful representation of that appearance is made of primal importance, under the name of aerial perspective’.
Ruskin’s technical drawings illustrate his precision skills as a draughtsman and scientific thinker. For Ruskin, gradations of line as well as colour were central to the delineation of the skies. His ‘Cloud Perspective’ studies from Modern Painters show geometric compositional rulings applied to cloud formations.
John Ruskin, ‘Cloud perspective: rectilinear’, 1860, Modern Painters V, Plate 64, LE VII, ed. by Cook and Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905) © The Ruskin, Lancaster University
John Ruskin, ‘Cloud perspective: curvilinear’, 1860, Modern Painters V, Plate 65, LE VII, ed. by Cook and Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905) © The Ruskin, Lancaster University
Clouds also offered a model of a permanently changing natural world. Ruskin argued that the power of drawing to understand the clouds ‘alters and renders clear our whole conception of the architecture of the sky’.
Ruskin painted the skies using a cyanometer, a device for measuring the blueness of the sky. It was invented by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who wanted to trace colour intensity of the sky over Mont Blanc. In 1787, Saussure reached the summit and measured the sky: 39 degrees blue. #COP26
From his home at Brantwood, Ruskin noticed the colour of the sky was changing. Ruskin’s arguments and his careful documentation of what he described as the ‘plague wind’, accumulated over a lifetime’s study of the skies, were dismissed by his contemporaries as ‘imaginary or insane’. #COP26
Meteorological records show, however, that Ruskin was correct. The effects of human activity on the atmosphere were reaching a critical point. Ruskin’s calls for active stewardship of the natural world remain urgent today. #COP26
Project Lead: Ben Wills-Eve