In honor of Earth Day, the Columbia Climate School featured the recent joint Earth Institute/ Mana Contemporary "Actors from Witnesses" event in their State of the Planet blog, in which Zaria Forman, Jeff Frost, and I were panelists. An excerpt from the article is below.
April 20, 2021
By Elise Gout
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Bridging Fact and Emotion
The psychology behind public engagement suggests that the visual narratives provided through art help people process, internalize, and respond to information more effectively than facts alone. By molding their experiences into an opportunity for emotional connection, artists form a keystone between the viewer and the changing climate.
Forman first sought to do this through capturing the ice. For artist Jeff Frost, it began with wildfire — or, more accurately, 70 different wildfires over the span of five years. His compilation of this footage, a 25-minute film entitled “California on Fire,” is structured around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. With each one, the intangibility of the climate crisis becomes something familiar — its vastness, personal.
“My feeling is that if you make art that is trying to be didactic first, it probably won’t be very good art,” said Frost. “I primarily try to connect with people’s hearts and curiosity.”
It is a distinction that Caroline Juang knows well, both as an artist herself and a Ph.D. student with Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research involves analyzing the steady increase of burned forest area in the western United States. “Science is there to give the information, to support this idea of climate change,” said Juang. “With Jeff’s film, it’s almost as if your house is burning down, or if your house is not burning down, that you’re the firefighter.”
Juang’s digital artwork often imagines inspirational futures made possible through the continued advancement of science. In Pale Blue Dot (2020), a group of civilian astronauts admire the Earth rise over the moon. Image courtesy of Caroline Juang
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Read the full article on the Columbia Climate School's State of the Planet.