This is a collaborative project between Zach Smith, Program Coordinator of the Wright Center for Innovative science education at Tufts University, Medford, MA, and Scott Battaion, Media Coordinator of the Wright Center for science Education
( www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/), and myself, Nathalie Miebach, as the artist. Together we are building data collecting devices that are being used to collect science data from a coastal environment on Cape Cod (Provincetown, MA), which are then used to examine larger environmental changes. These data is being collected using 3-D quadrats, which are essentially 1 m3 cubes, made of PVC pipes, containing scientific instruments for data collection. Functioning as mini-environments, these 3-D quadrats collect real life science data, from which certain variables are selected and examined in the context of larger environmental changes (e.g.: ice on/off dates, faunal migration patterns, floral changes, temperature anomalies, CO2 concentration, and others). These data are then translated into woven sculptures that examine linkages between these locally recorded environmental changes and broader regional and global climate change.

I’ve been working on an interdisciplinary collaborative hybrid art/research project for the last year and a half. Its called Arctic Listening Post and includes a series of works that explore our cultural imaginary of the Arctic, particularly focusing on climate change. This networked conversation, Climate Commons, began as I spent a year in a research blog project, Deepnorth, a virtual expedition to the North Pole, in which I gathered from the internet each day an image, a fact, or a story, and slowly accrued a kind of narrative mapping of the representations of the North Pole, from science, history, sports feats, mass media, art, fiction, and politics.