El Niño Watch

After many months of hearing about the huge impending El Niño, with no actual signs of storms, Juliana Rico took action into her own hands. Arming herself with the tools of a citizen journalist- an iPhone and access to social media, Rico began the journey of reporting on El Niño through a durational performance on Instagram. El Niño Watch investigated and followed the predicted El Niño weather phenomenon in Southern California from November 2015 - March 2016. Rico adopted a weather forecaster persona and posted daily video updates to Instagram closely following the weather and El Niño while talking about everything from pop culture to relationships to politics. 

The daily posts played off of the main stream medias over sensationalized portrayal of El Niño and the reality of Southern California’s idyllic weather to create a satirical and witty feed. A community of viewers followed along, commented, and reacted in the comments of the posts. El Niño Watch utilized Instagram’s popular motifs: selfies, ridiculous hashtags, and trending topics to create clever content remarking on news, social media and culture on a daily basis. 

Follow @el_nino_watch on Instagram for the complete project.