'Dialectics of Climate Futures' aims to clarify the interwoven relationships of the climate crisis and initiate a discourse. Through dialectics - the method of knowledge creation by logical argumentation along opposing positions - the project asks us to break out of our habitual thought patterns and constructively confront possibly uncomfortable emotions.
The interactive installation utilizes a touch screen, which allows users to select their emotions related to the climate crisis and fill in pre-formulated questions. The submitted question is processed by a generative pre- trained transformer (GPT) language model, which generates an answer based on the opposing emotional state that was previously selected. The resulting answer is then analyzed for its part-of-speech (POS) tags and visualized using a "Hierarchical Edge Bundling" algorithm.
The project began in a seminar connected to the research project "Tangible Climate Futures", which considers the usefulness of data and visualisations in mediating climate change by developing and testing an open data interface and infrastructure making possible mixed-media experiments and artworks that make climate change data tangible.
'Tangible Climate Futures' is funded through the Climate Change Center Berlin-Brandenburg, an inter- and transdisciplinary center for research and knowledge transfer and a shared initative including the TU Berlin, UdK Berlin, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Charité, FU Berlin, HU Berlin, University of Potsdam and other partners. The research center funds research and transfer initiatives working towards making Berlin-Brandenburg net-zero.
'Dialectics of Climate Futures' aims to clarify the interwoven relationships of the climate crisis and initiate a discourse. Through dialectics - the method of knowledge creation by logical argumentation along opposing positions - the project asks us to break out of our habitual thought patterns and constructively confront possibly uncomfortable emotions.
The interactive installation utilizes a touch screen, which allows users to select their emotions related to the climate crisis and fill in pre-formulated questions. The submitted question is processed by a generative pre- trained transformer (GPT) language model, which generates an answer based on the opposing emotional state that was previously selected. The resulting answer is then analyzed for its part-of-speech (POS) tags and visualized using a "Hierarchical Edge Bundling" algorithm.
The project began in a seminar connected to the research project "Tangible Climate Futures", which considers the usefulness of data and visualisations in mediating climate change by developing and testing an open data interface and infrastructure making possible mixed-media experiments and artworks that make climate change data tangible.
'Tangible Climate Futures' is funded through the Climate Change Center Berlin-Brandenburg, an inter- and transdisciplinary center for research and knowledge transfer and a shared initative including the TU Berlin, UdK Berlin, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Charité, FU Berlin, HU Berlin, University of Potsdam and other partners. The research center funds research and transfer initiatives working towards making Berlin-Brandenburg net-zero.