The 21st century has seen accelerating impacts on people and ecosystems from natural hazards and human development. Solving these wicked problems requires a transdisciplinary, collaborative approach to research. To this end, Earth Lab and the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Impact Lab (ESIIL) help facilitate working groups and events for collaborative data analytics and synthesis. However, in academic institutions interdisciplinary work often focuses on collaborations across different scientific disciplines, rather than integration between scientific and humanities disciplines. This hamstrings the potential for enhanced communication and creative paradigm shifts driven by art-science collaborations.

In 2024, Earth Lab and ESIIL collaborated with CU Boulder’s Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts to run the Forest Carbon Codefest Artist-in-Attendance program. The Forest Carbon Codefest was a 3-day in-person event held at CU Boulder during which six teams of 4-5 scientists, land managers, and industry partners used advanced computing and data to investigate research questions related to forest disturbances and aboveground carbon storage. While forests have the potential to regulate a changing climate through uptake of carbon dioxide, this function is being compromised by increasing wildfires and other disturbances in the Southern Rocky Mountains. Teams defined their own questions, and then collaboratively answered that question in the form of a fully open, reproducible, and complete code script. Three artists also participated in the event: Emma Piper-Burket, Luis Xavier de Pablo, and Roberto Azaretto, during which they had an opportunity to ask questions, contribute ideas, and learn about data and science related to forest carbon. These artists, after gaining inspiration and insight from the event, created artwork to inspire visiting ESIIL scholars and working groups. In this blog we share the artistic outcomes from the Artist-in-Attendance program, in addition to a discussion of the importance of art-science collaborations for solving environmental problems and advancing the fields of both art and science.

The artists-in-attendance possess diverse backgrounds in various artistic mediums, from filmmaking to visual arts to musical composition, showcasing the diversity in creative expression. Each artist was encouraged to create a final piece for display in a public space, increasing exposure to the collaboration, and all pieces were produced as visual media. Below is the final artwork of these artists and the pieces' descriptions.

Artists-in-attendance and their work

Roberto Azaretto: University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Critical Media Practices
Title: image.noise.map.data
Medium: Digital media
Website: https://robertoazaretto.wordpress.com/

The pieces that constitute “image.noise.map.data” were created by extracting color palettes from landscapes of the Southern Rockies ecoregion and then using R to insert randomly ordered sequences of pixels with those color values in images containing the contour of the region.

Emma Piper-Burket: University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Critical Media Practices
Title: Half a Gram of CO2
Medium: Handmade charcoal paint pigment, paper
Website: https://emmapiperburket.com/

The watercolor paint used for “Half a Gram of CO2” was created by collecting and grinding pieces of charcoal left on the ground from the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire. Based on rough estimates of carbon content in charcoal, the pigment used on the page contains enough carbon for approximately half a gram of CO2.

“Attending the Forest Carbon Codefest made me think about carbon sequestration in new ways; the idea that physical objects hold carbon made me want to more clearly visualize what a certain amount of carbon looks like.” - Emma Piper-Burket
 

Luis Xavier de Pablo: University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Title: CU Boulder South
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, watercolor on sketch paper
Website: https://www.luisxdepablo.com/

These pieces depict a meadow at the CU Boulder South Campus. The watercolor studies created during the codefest imagine the location before, during, and after a wildfire–a major theme of the Forest Carbon Codefest. The acrylic painting combines imagery from each of these studies.

The critical role of art-science collaborations

Art-science collaborations are becoming increasingly important to improve scientific communication and encourage real-world behavior shifts. For years, scientists have  conducted complex research and disseminated their findings via scientific journals. However, in this process, the overall message scientists aim to communicate can often be misunderstood or altogether ignored due to the complex language used to explain their research (Opermanis et al. 2015). This significantly hinders the scientific method because it cuts off the final step: communicating results. There is no use in doing science at all if one’s findings are incomprehensible. “It is important to stay fluid as to how research can be communicated,” said Erin Espelie, co-director of NEST. Through storytelling and creative representations of data, art-science collaborations seek to bridge this gap by creating emotional connection. In the context of environmental science, these connections can encourage sustainable actions and mindsets.

Presenting the facts alone is less likely to result in long-term changes in feelings and behavior (Jacobson et al. 2007). However, these behavioral changes are key to solving many of our environmental problems. Art has the unique power to touch the heart and mind of an individual to inspire meaningful change. For example, art can create an intrinsic appreciation of nature, ultimately motivating people’s willingness to protect it (Carr 2004). Today, fewer generations are coming in direct contact with nature, instead experiencing the outdoors more vicariously through cinema, television, photography, and other forms. These visual art forms can expose audiences to the beautiful and practical values of our natural resources. Art-science collaborations can amplify this message by providing an emotional connection to the scientific results, ultimately reaching more diverse audiences and communicating more effectively (Curtis et al. 2014).
   
Conservation work, in particular, deals with complex problems such as biodiversity loss, pollution, and deforestation that require innovative solutions. Transdisciplinary approaches can encourage both artists and scientists to strive for innovation within their work. Beauty/art can have meaning, and research can be communicated in a more personal way (Clark et al. 2020). While the Forest Carbon Codefest Artist-in-Attendance program was one of ESIIL/Earth Lab’s first art-science collaborations, many of our members also identify as artists in addition to their scientific identities; scientists are also poets, painters, potters, musicians, and photographers. The artistic and scientific pursuits of our members inform one another, leading to new insights and discoveries. These insights are enhanced when generated by creative collaboration.

Ultimately, uniting the disciplines of art and data science will be essential to solving interwoven social-ecological problems during this period of global environmental change. This initiative was a first opportunity to expose scientists at ESIIL/Earth Lab events and artists sponsored through NEST to new avenues of art-science transdisciplinary approaches. We look forward to creating future collaborations in which there is a bidirectional flow of ideas between art and science. In the meantime, come check out the art in person, located in ESIIL!
 

References
Carr, D. (2004). Moral values and the Arts in Environmental Education: Towards an ethics of Aesthetic Appreciation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 38(2), 221–239. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-8249.2004.00377.x 
Clark, S. E., Magrane, E., Baumgartner, T., Bennett, S. E. K., Bogan, M., Edwards, T., Dimmitt, M. A., Green, H., Hedgcock, C., Johnson, B. M., Johnson, M. R., Velo, K., & Wilder, B. T. (2020). 6&6: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Art–Science Collaboration. BioScience, 70(9), 821–829. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26975811
Curtis, D. J., Reid, N., & Reeve, I. (2014). Towards ecological sustainability: Observations on the role of the arts. S.A.P.I.EN.S. Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment and Society. https://journals.openedition.org/sapiens/1655 
Jacobson, S. K., McDuff, M. D., & Monroe, M. C. (2007). Promoting conservation through the arts: Outreach for hearts and Minds. Conservation Biology, 21(1), 7–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00596.x 
Opermanis, O., Kalnins, S. N., & Aunins, A. (2015). Merging Science and Arts to Communicate Nature Conservation. Journal for Nature Conservation, 28, 67–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnc.2015.09.005