Pollution Pods: can art change people's perception of climate change and air pollution? (original) (raw)
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“Pollution Pods”: The merging of art and psychology to engage the public in climate change
Global Environmental Change, 2019
Environmental artists have risen to the challenge of communicating the urgency of public action to address environmental problems such as air pollution and climate change. Joining this challenge, the immersive artwork Pollution Pods (PPs) was created through a synthesis of knowledge from the fields of environmental psychology, empirical aesthetics, and activist art. This study summarizes the scientific process in this transdisciplinary project and reports the findings from a questionnaire study (N = 2662) evaluating the effect of the PPs on visitors. Data were collected at the first two exhibitions of the installation, one in a public park in Trondheim, Norway, and one at Somerset House, London, UK. Intentions to act were strong and slightly increased after visiting the art installation. Individual changes in intentions were positively associated with self-reported emotions of sadness, helplessness, and anger and self-reported cognitive assessment their awareness of the environmental consequences of their action, their willingness to take responsibility for their consequences, and belief in the relevance of environmental problems for daily life. Education and age were negatively associated with intentions. Despite favorable intentions, however, taking advantage of an actual behavioral opportunity to track one's climate change emissions behavior after visiting the PPs could not be detected. We conclude that environmental art can be useful for environmental communication and give recommendations for communicators on how to best make use of it. We emphasize the potential benefits of art that encourages personal responsibility and the need for valid behavior measures in environmental psychological research.
Between dread and delight: motivational discourses in climate change art
2015
During the last decade (2005-2015), artists from all over the world have taken on climate change as the subject matter of their work. Encouraged by activists (most notably Bill McKibben), artists have appropriated climate change as a social problem and decided that they too, alongside journalists and scientists, could do something to heighten public engagement with this pressing issue. Several major exhibitions, most notably in Boulder (2007), London and Copenhagen (2009), Paris (2012), New York (2013), Boston (2014), and Melbourne (2015), have placed climate change art on the map as a new and timely genre. In this paper, I take a critical look at the stated motivations and experienced outcomes of climate change art, by analyzing the statements of over 20 artists and the comments made by curators, critics and members of the general public. I argue that much progress has been made in defining climate change art as a genuinely artistic, rather than propagandistic or didactic practice. Though caught in the net of many criticisms, climate change art plays a crucial role in allowing the public to rethink the role of human beings’ everyday activities in irrevocably altering the climate system – it makes the Anthropocene a cultural reality. However, a risk in much climate change art is reverting to the aesthetic of the sublime, which has a long-standing tradition but which I argue does nothing to meaningfully engage the public with climate change.
Artful climate change communication: overcoming abstractions, insensibilities, and distances
This article considers how visual and sonic art creates encounters through which audiences can experience climate change. Building on reviews published in WIREs Climate Change on images, films, drama, climate science fiction, and other literary forms, we examine how audio and visual art addresses the enduring problems of climate change communication. We begin with three of these problems: climate change's often abstract nature, the distances in time and space between those who cause climate change and the places its effects are felt, and forms of human– environmental relations that shape how climate is understood. We reflect on how, through a combination of vision and sound, art creates sensory experiences that tackle these challenges. In querying how our artistic examples bring about environmental engagements, we combine an analysis of the representations and narratives of these works with an appreciation of their aesthetic form—in short, how these art pieces activate emotional and experiential responses. While we recognize the limits of what art can do, especially the gallery-based forms of work we study here, we argue that spending time exploring the encounters that art creates helps us to understand what it brings to the communication of climate change. It also demonstrates how lessons learnt about sensory experience, affect, and emotions might be more widely applied to the analysis of cultural forms—from literature to films— and their role in climate change communication.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2021
In this paper, we investigate five activist-artistic approaches to argue for a sensory politics of the Anthropocene. Our aim is to highlight the affective and speculative potentials of art by examining how artists engage with the senses to make air pollution and its political implications visible, tangible, or otherwise experiential. The paper touches on widerreaching discourses on the politics of sensing, sensible politics, and sensory studies. Rather than situating air pollution within a policy framework, such as that of the international sustainable development goals, we locate our arguments within recent scholarship on postpolitics and the Anthropocene. Despite its episte-mological slipperiness, we consider the Anthropocene to be a potent heuristic as well as a rich resource of ideas, data, and collaborative and antagonistic potential for artists working on issues of air pollution. The five case studies are each grounded in an explicit engagement with at least one of the five basic senses and include works Laboratories (NL). Clustered into three lines of argumentation, we demonstrate the ways in which these works contribute to the politicization of air: first, by framing air as a contested common good that problematizes the commodification of clean air; second, by integrating artistic research and environmental communication strategies; and third, by providing sensory experiences of the complicated constellations of agency and perception in the interscalar phenomenon of air pollution. Although our analysis is not exhaustive, three particularities could be identified in the works: an openness to other forms of knowledge and communication; a potent critique of the Anthropocene; and a radical questioning of 'the political'. In conclusion, we argue that art can mobilize a sense of urgency and empowerment towards a multi-sensory politics of the Anthropocene.
Representational Art Can Reveal Unique Climate Change Solutions
As It Is: Proceedings of The Representational Art Conference , 2015
Representational art focused on the natural world can help us understand the personal and social impacts of human caused climate change. The most valuable artists in this regard are those that help us move beyond the worry and fret we may feel but not acknowledge about the ecological disaster we continue to cause and then offer clues about unique ways to solve it. A few radical critics insist that nature artists who avoid our climate crisis by continuing to produce spectacular unspoiled landscapes are making art they label “obscene.” Artists can help shift attitudes and consciousness about our new roles as protectors and restorers of our threatened world, and in the process, lift our grim moods and point ways forward to recovery.
As solutions and strategies to counter climate change make little progress and scientists struggle to get their findings accepted in the public domain, alternative ways to foreground the urgency of climate change action and prompt changes in behaviour require attention. As long ago as 340 BCE, in his Meteorologica, Aristotle made connections between the body and the atmosphere that surrounded it. He compared our breathing in and breathing out to atmospheric exhalations, which he believed to be the way that clouds formed. Throughout history artists and poets have created representations of the atmospheric world, often with the intention of communicating its emotional effects. This paper will explore the potential for art to influence behaviour and attitudes towards climate change by linking the atmosphere and emotions through artistic representations
The main focus of this research will be on the role that Illustration, Animation and Art might play in raising awareness of Environmental Issues with a particular emphasis on Climate Change and will highlight creative events that took place in December 2015 to coincide with COP 21 in Paris. Through research undertaken using a range of sources including books, films, animations and the Internet, the aim is to identify individuals and collectives involved in creative practice that highlights Connected Communities of practitioners working individually and collectively, globally, towards the common theme of Climate Change. The research will include the work of the organization ' Forever Swarm ' and ' Cape Farewell 'and other Collectives and individuals working towards an exploration of this theme.
The fiction of aftermath: Public Art, public imagination and the aesthetics of climate change
[From introduction]What contribution can public art make to public understandings of climate change? Posing such a question opens the door to well-traversed debates regarding the social role and political aesthetics of art, and specifically, art’s capacity to engage the public in pressing local and global crisis. But the concern here is not whether public art can generate any tangible outcomes or social benefits in relation to Anthropogenic crisis as has been the purview of some recent research in the field of socially engaged eco-art (Mar, Lally, Ang and Kelly). But rather how, within the context of current and immanent ecological crisis, art may catalyse critical, affective conceptions of climate change on the level of the imagination. To this end the imagination is not to be treated as something that mediates the interior of the mind and the exterior of the world but rather, as an affective force that underpins our relations with the world and the discourses through which we make meaning of our everyday lives (Yusoff and Gabrys). Adopting such an approach is critical to understanding what can be described as the futurist orientation of climate change, because, as Yusoff and Gabrys argue, ‘the imagination not only shapes the perception of climate change but co-fabricates it in ways that effect the possibilities to act upon it’ (520). In this light, this essay is specifically concerned with the ways in which public art is in dialogue with political rhetoric and media imagery to shape imaginings of climate change. Thus, it takes into consideration the wider field of discourses that shape public perceptions, and proceeds from the premise that art does not have a monopoly on aesthetics, but is rather competing with forms of knowledge production and transmission in the public arena that also have aesthetic capacities. This means that it seeks to interrogate how anthropogenic crisis and its dominant narrative of climate change are given cultural meaning and communicated in the public arena, drawing upon both sociological and art theoretical understandings of the relationship between aesthetics and social change. It focuses on one specific public artwork, Activate 2750 (2009) [Figure 1], by the Australian artist Ash Keating, and one specific aspect of climate change politics that is central to this work: catastrophe and apocalypse. Ultimately it argues that through Keating’s fictionalisation of apocalypse, Activate 2750 offers the public an opportunity to engage with the figure of catastrophe in a manner that, however dystopian, is not constrained by the moral binaries which frequently circumscribe public discussions around the future implications of climate change.
Calling All Artists: Moving Climate Change From My Space to My Place
2009
Each year, the Gallup Poll reports that more Americans claim to understand global climate change better than they did the previous year (Carroll 2007; Saad 2007). Climate-change-communication researchers Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (2004) have argued that while people understand climate change, they do not yet feel suffi cient urgency to take meaningful action. They and others have suggested the enormous time lags in biophysical and social systems, the fact that developed countries and the power elites within them are relatively insulated from the effects of climate change, and the overshadowing of climate change