Climate and climate change-related data lend themselves to becoming creative material for artists who process and visualize these issues through specifically designed softwares. Climate is both the subject and the object of the «Climate Art: New Ways of Seeing Data» exhibition presented by the IMC Lab + Gallery, a New York City-based organization that has been supporting artists since 2001. Collaborating artists explore imaginative uses of technology and combine the tangibility of objects with the intangibility of virtual space.
The choice of theme and the method of this exhibit reveal two very important aspects regarding the relationship between art, life and the technological world: the attention that art pays to climate change, its visualization through data collection and its organization in thematic mappings. Several artists have used the topic of climate as the subject for their work over the years, being that interest in this issue has increased exponentially with the ecological threat of global warming.
This exhibit analyzes work by established software artists who have chosen this medium for the instrument of their creative expression. Selected artists are Ursula Endlicher, Ben Fry, Aaron Koblin, Nathalie Miebach, Camille Seaman, and Karolina Sobecka. Their visual processing is called here to measure and visualize climatic phenomena by making environmental logic visible along with materializing one of the invisible parts of our ecosystem upon which our every action has great impact.
Digital Climate Art has become a legitimized term, often used by scientist and astrophysicist Roger Malina in his appeal to form a community of artists and scientists which focuses upon working together towards the goal of ecological awareness in order to contribute to the creation of a new cultural imaginary.
Climate Art: New Ways of Seeing Data is curated by Isabel Walcott Draves, founder of LISA (Leaders in Software and Art) and is part of MARFA Dialogues /NY, in a citywide examination that is transforming New York into a stage hosting environmental activists and artistic experimentation.
Climate Art: New Ways of Seeing Data, IMC Lab + Gallery, October 12 – November 27, 2013, 56 W 22nd St, 6th Fl , New York, New York 10010
Images 1 (cover) Ben Fry, Powering The World, 2012, capitalized software 2 Aaron Koblin, Further Flight, 2005
