The science of climate change is generally communicated through screen-based visualisations, graphs and other technical forms. However, we know from research that people respond poorly to information-heavy diagrams, seeing little connection between the abstract data values they represent and the ‘natural values’ of the ‘subjective climate’ they experience. Our encounters with climate science are also swamped by noisy information environments that fight for our focus, muffling urgent environmental signals and stymieing public engagement. Tom Corbys and Giles Lanes research seeks to breakthrough these walls by re-establishing a sensory and emotional connection to the sites, oceans and atmospheres captured but obscured by the abstractions of climate data. They propose that climate data possess additional emotional content or feeling, which can be deployed in ways that give it a new life and public agency Using sustainable technologies, they translate this data into physical artworks and animations of dimensionality, texture and surface that can be shared, touched and experienced at human scale. They posit the material presence of this work operates as a lure or visceral short cut, enabling audiences to establish their own emotional connections with the complex forces at work behind the data.

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