Dear climate science and climate engineering colleagues and friends
We would like to invite you to consider joining our transdisciplinary research project looking to explore how climate scientists and engineers “see” and “feel” climate change.
The project arises in part from a recent interview I did for a young school student from Japan. I agreed to participate as part of his homework on climate change… He asked me a series of science questions but his last question really spoke to me in a visceral way – in fact it floored me momentarily. He asked me “how do you feel when you see changes in glaciers in the Arctic?”. No one has ever asked me how I feel about climate change before, but it seems to me that this may be the most important question now – how do scientists see and feel climate impacts through their current knowledge and modelled visions of the future? - because our emotions profoundly influence our capacity to be agents of change.
If this idea speaks to you, we would like to invite you to consider joining our project. We would need you to participate in three online workshops to explore these themes. The workshops will bring together climate scientists with artists to explore and express our “expert feelings” about climate change. The workshops will be on either 4th May and 7th June or 28th September and 26th October 2023. In either case you need to be able to attend both events of the pair. Final reveals of the art works will occur on 23rd November and 7th December 2023.
The workshops will be facilitated by Fern Smith from Emergence https://emergence-uk.org/ and co-attended by written, visual and performance artists and climate scientists such as yourself. We are hoping to explore questions such as: How do scientists respond to the data which they are expected to present in a detached and ‘objective’ manner? Why don’t we ask climate scientists how they feel about their work? What happens if we do? How might their relationship with their own research change were feelings to be acknowledged/discussed? How might art help us all begin to bridge the distance between facts, emotion, and action? We hope that the workshops will co-produce art, academic outputs and - most importantly - catalyse change, as well as lead to further projects on these themes in the future.
If you are interested to join this project, please respond with a short email response to climatelabwales@gmail.com and we’ll send you further details!
All best wishes, Tavi Murray and the Climate Lab team
