WEDNESDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER 2024
Each vertical stripe in Ed Hawkins’ art piece ‘Climate Stripes’ represents the average global temperature of one year. As icy blue lines shift to warmer reds, so does the planet’s climate. The image has become an icon of climate data and planetary change. Hawkins believes his data visualisations become artwork when they take on new meanings and contexts beyond traditional data presentation. He intentionally released his work on a Creative Commons licence, allowing anyone to take his images and bring them into new contexts. This decision has led to an explosion of uses, from the cover of the Economist magazine, to a bridge in Germany, to the backdrop of a band’s set at Reading Festival.The public reception of ‘Climate Stripes’ has shown how a legible, creative, and engaging presentation of climate data can take on new life in cultural contexts. The arts can express climate information with the added perspective of emotions and lived experiences that hard data cannot incorporate. Taking place in the overlap between objective data and subjective experience, the arts present a new strategy for science outreach that engages the public and even has the potential to impact how climate scientists understand their own data. As artists continue to interpret data through creative means, the question of art’s efficacy as a mode of science communication, and perhaps its unharnessed potential, has become increasingly intriguing to climate scientists, artists, and social scientists alike.
In May 2023, a University of Wisconsin-Madison study revealed that art can elicit stronger emotional responses from viewers than traditional climate data graphs. By presenting participants with a series of images depicting both traditional and artistic representations of the same data set, researchers discovered that information presented in artistic representations of the data was perceived as equally credible compared to traditional graphs. However, participants reported stronger emotional responses to the information when viewing it in an artistic context. In addition, the art’s emotional appeal appeared to somewhat mitigate the influence of pre-existing political beliefs on participants’ perceived relevance of climate change.
The study’s use of art exemplifies how creative approaches to data representation may change individuals’ interactions with climate data. In recent years, scientists like Jane Lubchenco, former administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), have argued that climate scientists have an ethical obligation to share relevant data with the public, and to do so in accessible and comprehensible ways. The arts may present an under-utilised method for communicating climate data to non-scientists.
The intersection of art and climate science is not necessarily a new development. Since 2001, the artist-led organisation Cape Farewell has been partnering scientists with artists on expeditions to encourage interdisciplinary dialogues about the climate crisis. The artists then create works inspired by the research they witnessed. Projects like Cape Farewell highlight the growing desire from both artists and scientists to find interdisciplinary ground in the face of climate change. While quantitative data may explain past and predicted changes in Earth’s systems, qualitative cultural interpretations explain what these changes mean to communities and individuals. Due to the anthropogenic nature of climate change, scientists must now take into account human activities historically studied through the social sciences and humanities.
At the same time, climate change continues to influence the daily lives of scientists and non-scientists. To fully grasp how environmental changes influence the world around us, it has become increasingly crucial for social scientists, humanities scholars, and perhaps most importantly, members of the public to understand concepts once reserved for natural scientists. By exploring climate data through the arts, scientists have the opportunity to understand climate change through its cultural meanings while translating the numbers of climate change into something culturally resonant to the public.
Unsurprisingly in a field dominated by graphs and charts, the most common way artists have reimagined climate data has been through visual mediums. The University of Wisconsin-Madison study exhibited the work of American painter Diane Burko. Her paintings combine swirls of colour, global imagery, and data visualisations into an amalgamation of the quantifiable and experiential aspects of climate change. Burko seeks to visually bring together intertwined issues of the climate crisis, allowing viewers to viscerally experience these connections through her work.
Meanwhile, artists like composer Chris Chafe have appealed to other senses to convey the complexities of climate change. In 2016, Chafe teamed up with three graduate students at UC Berkeley to create a musical composition representing the correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and average global temperatures over 1,200 years. The composition, which incorporates a rising drone representing CO2 levels and plucking sounds reflecting temperature changes, allows listeners to experience the vast timescales of climate change in ways visuals fail to capture.
Interactive digital arts projects have encouraged audiences to play with the data of climate science. In 2020, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) teamed up with Google’s Arts & Culture lab to create ‘Heartbeat of the Earth’, a series of interactive art pieces reimagining different sets of climate data. The series includes Fabian Oefner’s ‘Timelines,’ a digital glacier audiences explore as it retreats, and ‘Plastic Air,’ a program developed by Girogia Lupi wherein audiences deposit discarded items into the air and watch as cartoonish microplastics create colourful patterns. Experiential artworks like these depict data in ways that allow the public to move through the information and participate in the storymaking of the data, transforming it from something stagnant into something to be explored, moulded, and experienced.
The emotional impact and meaning-making benefits of these artistic experiments may seem obvious to individuals in the arts and humanities, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison study provides a valuable social science backing for such ideas. However, some worry that expressions of artistic licence may obscure data and mislead audiences. Hawkins’ blue and red stripes depict average global temperatures from 1850 onwards, becoming a symbol of recent drastic warming. However, climate scientists like Pierre Gosselin point out that if expanded to encompass temperatures from the past 2,000 years, the story of the image changes dramatically. Suddenly, red warming stripes appear scattered throughout the image. One choice over what data to include would change not only the work itself, but the entire story it tells. The propensity to tell limited parts of the climate change story, particularly considering climate science’s history of denial by members of the public, makes tethering data to emotional interpretations a potentially discrediting endeavour. Artists should be cautious that the nuanced ways data gets presented can steer stories of climate change in directions that can be either empowering or misleading.
Art’s storytelling capacity can be both a vice and a virtue. As artists interpret the numbers of climate data, they invite audiences to craft their own stories around the information, engaging the public in ways traditional data presentations cannot. These stories bring data beyond the interpretive control of the scientific community and imbue it with new cultural significance. As long as the red hues of climate change continue to colour our lives, artists will process the growing entanglements of science and culture through their work. The story of climate change and the narratives of its data will increasingly be co-created by scientists, artists, and members of the public.
Article by Emily Goniea
Image cedit: Prof. Ed Hawkins, Univeristy of Reading.
Available at: https://showyourstripes.info
CC-BY4.0 license
