BCS Futures Award Winner 2023
Critical Climate Machine - Gaëtan Robillard (France)
Artwork description
Critical Climate Machine is a project that quantifies and reveals the mechanisms of misinformation on global warming. The project consists of a data sculpture and a sound installation. The sculpture analyses myths about climate change, using natural language processing. Its software monitors and debunks false arguments originating from Twitter. Throughout this process, a temperature map witnesses the thermal effects of the installation on its environment. Several dialogues circulate: false arguments confront their refutations. These voices were recorded during several workshops, in the course of which The Refutation Game – a card game specially designed for the project, fostered climate literacy, critical thinking and debate. Later, the dialogues were reinterpreted and spatialized through a generative machine learning model conceived for musical improvisation. If via cognitive sciences, computational logic helps to discern the truth, the sound piece explores digital mediation frameworks for the climate, opening up to deliberation. Critical Climate Machine acts as a counterpoint to the determinism of technical automation, while bringing forward the ethics of data processing, at the intersection of physical and informational space.
Partners and collaborators
Art and research: Gaëtan Robillard
Machine Learning algorithm: John Cook, Travis Coan, Constantine Boussalis, Mirjam O. Nanko
Musical research: Jérôme Nika
Computer music: Dionysios Papanikolaou
Art and education: Özlem Sulak
Engineering: Laurine Capdeville, Jolan Goulin
The Refutation Game: Gaëtan Robillard, Laurine Capdeville
Sound production: IRCAM Centre Pompidou
Equipment: Laboratoire des Intuitions, ESAD TALM-Tours
CCM is part of the MediaFutures project, and has received funding from the European Union’s framework Horizon 2020 for research and innovation program under grant agreement No 951962. As part of CCM, Patterns of Heat is an artistic research conducted in the framework of the intelligent.museum project at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and at the Deutsches Museum.