Human Fingerprints and Artistic Vocabulary; Rendering Data, Creating Engagement, Connection and Context to Earth System Models [conference paper]
Conference
American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting - December 8, 2020
Authors
Francesca Samsel (adjunct assistant professor), Daniel Keefe (associate professor), Bridger Herman (Ph.D. student), Greg Abram
Abstract
Artists delve into complex themes via a visual language honed over time and refined through experimentation, iteration, and revision. In the course of these processes artists leave their signatures, signatures of our humanity: fingerprints, brushstrokes, embodied gestures, and the footprints of our thought processes. These signatures provide context, historical, cultural and individual. For work on the boundary of art and science it is these signatures that remind us that behind the work, both the art and science, is another person sorting through the same experiences of our time, seeking to understand and make peace with internal and external incongruence.
Distant Poles is a video experience merging the human signatures of artistic language with the factual and mathematical expressions from the scientists, creating a hybrid designed to provide entry into the complexity and enormity of climate change, specifically changing oceans conditions. Our work blends context with fact, blending metaphor with visual engagement, all designed to dissolve the barriers of scientific language and provide entry into the complexities and impacts of warming seas, ocean acidification and sea-level rise. While designed as an immersive experience, to enable on-line presentation, we will make public three videos. The first is our artistic contribution that blends the fingerprints, visual context, metaphor with visualizations of the multi-variate, MPAS- Ocean model. The second focuses on an immersive exploration of the visualizations showing how our artist driven system has enabled us to depict dynamics and physical properties of ocean regions as they change over time. The third video that lifts the curtain on the process by giving viewers a guided tour of the software and artifacts used to construct the work. These include the new Artifact-Based Rendering interface that enables art to be represent data as well as the artistic artifacts of the process collages that drove the development of the colormapping system and hand-size clay sculptures that represent the physics of the ocean.
Link to full paper
Keywords
visualization