Rostock Regression

Rostock Regression

In Rostock Regression Niemeyer explores two perspectives on a time series: The idea that we are always in the middle of data streams, and the idea that we can listen to a data stream and its linear regression at the same time.

The first idea situates viewers where they can both remember the past and imagine the future. If we shift the entry point into the past, we can observe the relative past and the relative future in a kind of "temporal stereo". In this video, Niemeyer shifted the entry point to 1937, the year his father was born, near Rostock. The temporal stereo perspective supports an imagination of the future which is on par with our awareness of the past. Walter Benjamin's comment about historians and fortune tellers is the inspiration for this work.

The linear regression is a best-fit line for a time series. Sea water levels are very "noisy" because the tide cycles and storms produce sea water level changes of over 500 mm which are immediately apparent. Hidden in these dramatic changes we can find the linear regression, which, over centuries, shows a steady rise of 208 mm in sea water levels due to global warming.