Sensing Change (review)

Sensing Change, an initiative of the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), explores climate and environmental change using both the sciences and the fine arts, often with interviews and oral history as lenses. The project hosted public programs and exhibits in Philadelphia (the home of the CHF) from summer 2013 to spring 2014, and now has a permanent exhibit via its website. Sensing Change is timely and innovative, building on a growing wave of interest amongst scholars, artists, educators, and funders to meld biophysical science with the arts and humanities, especially to harness the power of the arts to better interpret climate change science to the public.

There are three main exhibits on the Sensing Change site: “Art,” “Science,” and “Instruments.” The “Art” section of the website includes visuals and descriptions of eight different climate-change-oriented artworks, done by fine artists (often in collaboration with scientists and using scientific data), such as the “Particle Falls” installation that visually displayed air quality data in real time, using an air sampling instrument linked to a dynamic light sculpture attached to the side of a building in downtown Philadelphia. There are also interview clips, so we can hear from the artists themselves about how they conceived of and executed the works. The artists work in many mediums including visual art, performance, film and digital media, and the Sensing Change exhibits are some of the most compelling examples of science-art works that I’ve seen. I especially appreciate the way many of the pieces—not only “Particle Falls,” but also works such as “Wind Map” and “Calendar of Rain”—seamlessly meld artwork with representation of scientific data sets that are meaningful to our everyday lives.

The “Science” part of the website contains interview clips of climate scientists thoughtfully discussing topics ranging from the way they carry out their own work, to how best to convey their work to the public, to ways that scientists partner with the public and how the arts can be useful in communicating scientific ideas and data. Here is a snippet from an interview clip with Alastair Lewis, professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of York in the UK:

Art often has a very impressive way of showing complex ideas in a way that you can digest relatively rapidly … When you see something that visualizes a concept in a way that engages people or makes them think about something … You can somehow represent a physical, a chemical, and a biological process with a [painting] in a way that you don’t seem to ever really get across with a snapshot photograph or with us [scientists] producing some chemical data.

(http://sensingchange.chemheritage.org/sensing-change/science/alastair-lewis)

It’s refreshing to be able to listen to scientists discuss their work in these ways, and I think the interview and science oral history components are amongst the most valuable aspects of the Sensing Change project. I use oral history as a tool in my own interdisciplinary environmental science scholarship, and through my research I’ve learned that oral history collections of scientists are rare. CHF has one of these rare collections; in fact, it has an entire program dedicated to oral history of chemists with its own excellent website and online archive.

The “Instruments” part of the site helps us “learn more about the people, technology, and experiments that have helped us get a better look at the complex processes and systems of our environment” (http://sensingchange.chemheritage.org/sensing-change/instruments). In this online history of science exhibit, we get to see some of the pieces of technology, groundbreaking at the time, that were used to collect early climate and environmental data. We even get to read the lab notebook from an 1896 high school student about her class work doing drinking water analysis!

These three questions are stated on the home page of the website:

What motivates artists and scientists to...