CriticalDraft : Bibliography

Hannah Rees
Jul 28, 2021
8 min read

In order to collate my research for this phase in one place, I will utilise this blog post for all research conducted in the next Phases (Phase 3&4).

I’m wanting to consider the psychology behind immersive experiences and utilise case studies of Climate Change Exhibitions which have had an impact on making a societal impact through tangible exhibits.

Case Study : Ice Watch by Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing

This interactive exhibit utilised blocks of ice taken from Greenland to display outside heavy footfall areas of London in line with the COP24 conference. This simplistic yet powerful concept enabled visitors to touch ice from Greenland and tangibly feel them melting under their hands. The floor was wet and the sense of sadness was a powerful emotion borne from this exhibit.

Eliassion’s exhibit really showed me that we don’t need confusing, over complicated exhibits to make a powerful impact, and following the case studies last week, I don’t think I will be including posters and long paragraphs for visitors to read. It takes away from the impact of the experience.

This exhibit was intended to stop us from growing “numb and passive” to the loss of the world’s polar ice caps.

We must recognise that together we have the power to take individual actions and to push for systemic change”

Case Study : Sadness is a no gO-Zone by Adapt

This exhibition was a collaborative results from over 50 artists from around the world. Creating posters and small exhibition spaces around a certain topic regarding climate change, the artists responded to the briefs in their own personal ways. It was intended to push a postive spin on our constant negativity from the media and news.

By inviting people to ACT during the exhibition, it was a powerful way of encouraging social movement and power to make a change.

This exhibition was WAY more complex than Ice Watch but I don’t think it had the same impact – they claimed that by having video installations and protest flag making the visitors were making a societal change. However the majority of the exhibition was just looking at posters that had been made – this can often be extremely powerful but it’s also extremely passive in a subject where passivism is probably the worst habit to have!

However, I do believe that in involving other artists, the progression they made with the exhibition and the reach they had was very powerful. I’m hoping to contact Adapt to discuss this project and future ideas they have in mind.

They also used Ecosia, an Eco search engine which uses profits from ads to fund planting trees – a really creative and exciting alternative to the usual climate change activism you see. This could be something to include in my app/website if I follow that route.

Case Study : Climate Control by MET Studio

This project encouraged people to take individual steps that could have a collective impact on reducing carbon footprints. By again utilising immersive experiences and exhibitions, the visitors were asked to reflect on the past and look at how they can shape the future. This is very similar to the project I am working on for York Design Week, asking people to visualise the future and how it can be shaped.

All the exhibitions used illuminated LED signs and no paper, it’s important that an exhibiton for Climate Change doesn’t have an impact on the world itself – so something for me to consider in the future is how I could use solar panels to power the greenhouses etc.

“blue sky thinking” was an exhibit where visitors write down their own ideas of how they want to shape the city that they live in. These ideas were projected on to the wall to show the collective impacts of individual actions. This is something thats really powerful and is a good way, psychologically to make people realise their actions DO make a difference.

Case Study : In Real Life by Olafur Eliasson.

Another Eliasson exhibit – he’s the king of immersive experiences and this was reflected here too – viewers had another tangible way to consider their own relationship with the natural world and the impact we have.

Combining many different experiences, visitors were able to watch and explore as the world around them changed and adapted. They could visualise the effct changes would have on our world.

Case Study : The Anthropocene

This collective has exhibits around the globe and interactive online activities to get involved from home. It’s a really powerful website in itself and the exhibitions have a strong impact.

Again, it encourages the viewer/visitor to recognise and understand the impact we have on the world, it bring the far flung corners of the world to us and makes us recognise our accountability for the actions we take.

For example, they offer Gigapixel images of places around the world where you can zoom in and move around to explore every inch of a certain landscape. Each one has an extreme impact.

Their AR is amazing – by utilising an app called Avara Discover, users can visualise the Big Lonely Doug tree (the last douglas fir in a forest which the logger refused to chop down as it’s estimated his age is 1000 years, and so needed to be protected).

Their numerous types of media available on the website and through the exhibitions have a really interesting effect – again, the psychology of interactive and immersive experiences helps the overall feel of accountability.

This link here will take you to their 360° view of the trash dumping ground in Kenya – waste from around the globe is dumped here and the numerous compacted layers of waste that can’t be sifted through of recycled will become it’s own geographical layer.

In order to understand the fundamentals of this project and what to include, I need to understand the public perceptions of climate change and science and look at how my project can make a bigger difference.

I’ve emailed Christian Kockner who’s research programme inspired the Pollution Pods at Somerset House – his research so far into Societal Perceptions of science could be really valuable from a psychological point of view. I’m also due to talk to Kevin Cowtan at the University of York who also researches the public perceptions of science and how we can alter the way people see or perceive the given facts.

I suppose a large part of this project is analysing the way people see facts and figures, so often in the media we see facts that mean little to us, or images of far-flung countries suffering with little to no direct impact on us. HOWEVER, one only has to look at the recent flooding in Belgium, Germany and even London – flash floods are a major threat to our society here and, as much as I want this to be about the planet warming up, I still need to consider the use of flooding to make a larger impact.

Cape Farewell funded the project at Somerset House with Christian Klockner, and their collaborative project is very much in line with what I’m looking for – the connection between scientists, facts and artists visualising these to the public. They help artists create exhibitions and portrayals of their findings, and include artists in the actual investigations and expeditions too. David Buckland see artsits as creative communicators to fill the gaps where scientists and facts can not.

Back to Eliasson, his “weather project” at the Tate Modern had a huge impact on the visitors – looking at the way visitors interacted with the sun and the light showed me that immersive experiences help draw people in and bring them out of their”normal” world. Eliasson discussed his use of mirrors in his project “images of audience interacting and reacting to the installation” showed how valuable an immersive installation really was. The mirrors blurred the subject/object divide.

The ‘natural world’ went indoors, displaced, inverted, so that we can know how it looks inside out, how the building blocks work together; how humans play a major part in the assemblage of coherent knowledge that is stabilised by the selective forgetfulness of pragmatic truth.”

Eliasson’s quote here really shows me how valuable inverted installations can be, bringing the outside in, including mirrors to reflect the powerful nature of the project back onto the viewer. It is the gaze of the spectator that consitutes the piece.

i need to remember this – it’s vital that my project doesn’t go crazy with words, posters, film. It needs to be coherent, powerful, simplistic and thought-provoking.

I am toying with the idea of using mirrors along the base of the greenhouse to reflect the sea level rise that would take place alongside the heating of the earth. By utilising mirrors, visitors can interact with the space, reflect back on themselves the impact of their decisions and visualise the sheer difference over time.

2.0-work (no date). Available at: https://www.adapt-climate.world/2-0-work (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Atmosphere (no date) Science Museum. Available at: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/atmosphere (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Climate Assembly UK – Climate Assembly UK (no date). Available at: https://www.climateassembly.uk/www.climateassembly.uk/ (Accessed: 15 July 2021).

Climate change | Natural History Museum (no date). Available at: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/climate-change.html (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Climats artificiels | Art in Paris (no date) Time Out Paris. Available at: https://www.timeout.com/paris/en/art/climats-artificiels (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Dawood, S. (2016) ‘Immersive Climate Control exhibition asks visitors to reflect on carbon footprint’, Design Week, 11 May. Available at: https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/9-15-may-2016/new-immersive-exhibition-climate-control-asks-visitors-to-reflect-on-their-carbon-footprints/ (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Face Climate Change in Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Ice Watch’ Exhibit (10:46:23Z) Highsnobiety. Available at: https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/olafur-eliasson-minik-rosing-exhibition/ (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

New art and design exhibition to tackle climate change revealed, as UK experiences its hottest day on record (2019) Creative Boom. Available at: https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/new-art-and-design-exhibition-to-tackle-climate-change-revealed-as-uk-experiences-its-hottest-day-on-record/ (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

New exhibition re-imagines museums for climate action (no date). Available at: https://www.ukri.org/news/new-exhibition-re-imagines-museums-for-climate-action/ (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Nine ways Museum scientists are fighting the planetary emergency (no date). Available at: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/nine-ways-museum-scientists-are-protecting-our-planet.html (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life encourages us to engage with climate change (2019) Dezeen. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2019/07/10/olafur-eliasson-in-real-life-tate-modern-exhibition/ (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

‘The Anthropocene Project | Exhibition’ (no date) The Anthropocene Project. Available at: https://theanthropocene.org/exhibition/ (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Achiam, M. (2015) ‘Immersive Exhibitions’, in Gunstone, R. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Science Education. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 485–487. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-2150-0_346.

Collin-Lachaud, I. and Passebois, J. (2008) ‘Do Immersive Technologies Add Value to the Museumgoing Experience? An Exploratory Study Conducted at France’s Paléosite’, International Journal of Arts Management, 11(1), pp. 60–71.

Earth Day – York Green Party (no date). Available at: https://york.greenparty.org.uk/2021/04/22/earth-day/ (Accessed: 15 July 2021).

Eco-Visionaries is the latest exhibition about our destruction of the natural world (2019) Dezeen. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2019/11/20/eco-visionaries-ra-design-exhibition/ (Accessed: 27 September 2021).

Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art : Designing Nightmares (no date).

Freitas, S.D. et al. (2010) ‘Learning as immersive experiences: Using the four-dimensional framework for designing and evaluating immersive learning experiences in a virtual world’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(1), pp. 69–85. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01024.x.

‘Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk’ (no date) Climate Change Committee. Available at: https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/independent-assessment-of-uk-climate-risk/ (Accessed: 15 July 2021).

‘It’s awakened me’: UK climate assembly participants hail a life-changing event (2020) the Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/31/its-awakened-me-uk-climate-assembly-participants-hail-a-life-changing-event (Accessed: 15 July 2021).

Klöckner, C.A. (2020) ‘Communication to change climate-related behaviour’, Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change [Preprint]. Available at: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789900392/9781789900392.00020.xml (Accessed: 15 August 2021).

Land use and nature | Climate Action (no date). Available at: https://takeclimateaction.uk/resources/land-use-and-nature (Accessed: 15 July 2021).

Make your own exhibition (no date) Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Available at: https://www.maas.museum/make-your-own-exhibition/ (Accessed: 28 July 2021).

Popoli, Z. and Derda, I. (2021) ‘Developing experiences: creative process behind the design and production of immersive exhibitions’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 36(4), pp. 384–402. doi:10.1080/09647775.2021.1909491.

Scholz, J. and Smith, A.N. (2016) ‘Augmented reality: Designing immersive experiences that maximize consumer engagement’, Business Horizons, 59(2), pp. 149–161. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2015.10.003.

Sommer, L.K. et al. (2019) ‘“Pollution Pods”: The merging of art and psychology to engage the public in climate change’, Global Environmental Change, 59, p. 101992. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.101992.

Ventura, S. et al. (2019) ‘Immersive Versus Non-immersive Experience: Exploring the Feasibility of Memory Assessment Through 360° Technology’, Frontiers in Psychology, 10, p. 2509. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02509.