Visual, cultural, and social practices profoundly influence the perception and experience of the world, challenging conventional notions of beauty and power. These regimes, often unacknowledged or undervalued, shape the comprehension of what is deemed desirable or valuable and the underlying reasons behind such discernments.
Modelling and representing the multifaceted impacts of the climate crisis across diverse scientific disciplines further amplifies the complexity of these representations, creating a growing demand for simplified messages.
However, the challenge of understanding regimes of aesthetic power that are emerging from the climate transition is about the opposite: learning how to manage the inherent uncertainty that results from the information and knowledge acquired through scientific evidence.
This requires a reverse engineering of the tools of data sensing and visualisation in order to understand how strategies of automatisation claim to imitate reality and create new realities by analysing their structure, functionality, and underlying algorithms.
It may involve reappropriating these tools and technologies, challenging their assumptions, brushing them against the grain, and reusing them for creative purposes other than what they were designed for. This would allow for a rethinking and re-politicising of instrumentality in an age where there is no outside of instrumental reason.
Specific challenges for PACESETTERS main target groups:
- For artists and creatives: Gaining the creative confidence to explore techniques to repurpose and reverse engineer standard forms of data visualisation
- For research: Analysing the impact of these techniques to preserve the complexity of representations of the climate crisis
- For policymakers: Re-politicising instrumentality within the transformative capacities of artistic intelligence.
- For finance and investment: Creating instruments to accumulate the surplus from these experiments to increase aesthetic quality.