Weather App Uses Rothko Paintings to Show How Days Feel

Checking the weather has always been about numbers and icons, but Finnish designer Joonas Virtanen wondered if there was a better way to capture what a day truly feels like.

His answer came from an unexpected place: the museum. Virtanen created Current Rothko, a weather app that pairs your local forecast with paintings by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, transforming raw data into emotional atmosphere.

"Weather is data, but it's also a shared experience, and those two things rarely look alike," Virtanen explains. The traditional weather app tells you whether to bring an umbrella, but his tool translates all that information into the emotional register of your day.

Here's how it works: enter your location anywhere in the world, and the app pulls data on temperature, cloud cover, rain, fog, storms, time of day, and sunrise and sunset times. It then converts these conditions into what Virtanen calls a "mood register" with qualities like brightness and temperature.

A matching engine scores all 89 available Rothko paintings against your local conditions. A gloomy, overcast day might pull up the deep blues and purples from paintings in the Rothko Chapel, while a bright sunny afternoon could match the vibrant yellows and reds of Rothko's 1950 piece "No. 5/No. 22."

Virtanen goes deeper than typical weather apps by accounting for nuance. An 80-degree day in the humid tropics creates a completely different mood than the same temperature in a dry desert climate.

Why This Inspires

This project reminds us that technology doesn't have to strip away feeling to be functional. By bringing art into our daily routines, Virtanen created something that speaks to both our practical needs and our emotional experience of the world.

The color field paintings of Rothko were already designed to be immersive mood experiences. Now they're helping us prepare not just for what we'll encounter outside, but for how it might make us feel.

Current Rothko proves that even something as mundane as checking the weather can become a moment of beauty and connection.