Project outline
This network brought together leading digital artists, scientists, academics and public and private institutions to explore the creative potential of Climate Models (i.e. digital simulations used by science to picture, analyse and predict environmental change). Addressing the theme of 'Representing Environmental Change' the network investigated how multidisciplinary art-science practices could appropriate these models and disseminate them to new audiences.
Network members used a combination of practice-based and theoretical research to:
-
Explore how data from Climate Models can function as expressive visual, narrative and conceptual representations of environmental change beyond their original scientific contexts and purpose.
-
Bring digital art methodologies into scientific research processes in order to enhance understanding of the communicative agency of visual languages for climate scientists.
-
Gain understanding of how Climate Models can be used as art media to inform digital arts practices concerned with developing visual languages of the changing environment.
-
Develop modes of public display in order to order to gain understanding of exhibition and audience engagement strategies for this work.
-
Connect art and science, theory and practice to develop theoretical and methodological parameters, and subject boundaries of the project.
The network developed active relationships with a number of organisations outside of academia including (amongst others) scientists at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, The Leonardo Network and the Arts Catalyst alongside our core academic partners and the British Antarctic Survey.
Events
Workshop 1
Location: Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster
Date: 6th October 2010
This first workshop was titled 'Data Stories' and featured presentations by David Walton, Katrina Dean, Sean Cubitt, Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway.
Workshop 2
Location: Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster
Date: 15th December 2010
The second workshop was called 'Borderlands' and included presentations by Tom Corby, Andrew Clarke, Soren Pold, Roger Malina band Gary Hall.
Workshop 3
Location: Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster
Date: 23rd March 2011
The third workshop included presentations by Tom Corby, Mike Hulme, Nicola Triscott, Andrew Watson and Nathan Cunningham, and Martin John Callanan and Richard Hamblyn.
Workshop 4
Location: Arts Catalyst Project Space, Clerkenwell, London
Date: 20th May 2011
The fourth workshop incorporated an exhibition with work by Tom Corby, Jonathan Mackenzie and Gavin Baily (The Southern Ocean Studies) and Lise Autogena and Josh Portway (Most Blue Skies).
Achievements
Running in parallel with the workshops, a series of artworks (and ideas for artworks) have been developed with the Polar Data Centre of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). A series of watercolours were produced based on an archive of Soviet era climate model outputs of Antarctica found in the library at the British Antarctic Survey. The post-war numerical measurement of climate emerged from joint civilian and military needs connected to ideas around weather control, cold war politics and ironically the search for oil. As such, it seemed fitting to remediate these through an older medium, which has its own rich history of use in scientific voyages of discovery from an earlier era. These images are placeholders of complex and contradictory historical, technological and political relations, which in their own right parallel some of the complex eco-systemic dynamics they attempt to capture.
Artworks produced during the network were exhibited widely at international art festivals in Italy, Brazil, Australia and Istanbul (upcoming), demonstrating an implicit appetite for the research within the wider public.
One of the most important outcomes of the network was in demonstrating the value of creative practice, not necessarily as a conduit to communicating environmental change, but as a form of brokerage or research process toward different understandings of how this might occur. For the scientific membership this enabled them to think differently or experimentally about their practice and the public communication of its knowledge base. One of the key barriers to public appreciation of environmental change involves the invisibility of its processes coupled with the sheer complexity of the science required to describe them. For our external partners such as the Arts Catalyst, the network usefully enabled them to reflect upon their current public programming particularly in relation to how understanding of scientific knowledge production can inform wider cultural debates.