A broad yellow field, a thin band of red, a block of warm orange underneath. In Chicago it is 7:15 in the morning, the sky is clear, and the painting on screen is Mark Rothko’s No. 5 / No. 22 from 1950. Move to Kyoto at 9:30 at night under a partly cloudy sky and the canvas sinks into Black on Dark Sienna on Purple. In Portland, overcast at first light, it turns into the slate blue and brown of No. 37 (No. 19 Slate Blue and Brown on Plum).
This is Current Rothko, a website by Finnish product designer and creative director Joonas Virtanen that reads the weather where you are and answers with a painting. Instead of a forecast, you get a mood.
The site takes your location, temperature, cloud cover, rain, fog, storms, humidity and the hour relative to sunrise and sunset, and condenses them into what Virtanen calls a “mood register”: radiant, somber and so on, shown as a small row of colour swatches in the sidebar. That register is then scored against 89 works by Rothko, each one pre-classified by emotional tone, and the closest match takes the centre of the screen with a single line of caption tying it back to the sky outside. Not convinced by the pairing? An “Another” button draws a different canvas from the same register, while a city search lets you see what the hour feels like in Reykjavík, São Paulo or Cape Town.
Beyond the live view, the project opens onto a dark archive of the whole selection, from the loose multiforms of the late 1940s to the stacked colour fields of the 1950s, each tile labelled with title, year and a tiny extracted palette.
Virtanen built Current Rothko with Wabi.ai, his own platform for creating and remixing small apps without writing code, together with other AI tools. It sits next to earlier experiments of his such as Timeforms, which turns time and temperature into images, and Tangled Lines, a visual reading of the New York subway’s live status.
What we like is that the project takes Rothko at his word. The painter always insisted that his canvases were about basic human emotions, not about relationships between colours, and a tool that maps the weather onto feeling rather than onto hue respects that intention. It is also a quiet counterpoint to so much generative noise: no new image is produced here, the machine only chooses, and the choice is the design.
Try it at rothko.joonas.wtf. Via Colossal.
