dialectics of climate futures
2023, interactive installation, joint project with Philipp Proff
Dialectics of Climate Futures wants 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 - we hope to break out our habitual thought patterns and constructively confront possibly uncomfortable emotion spaces.
Anthropogenic climate change is more relevant than ever. Despite the scientific evidence that has been gathered and substantiated in recent decades, social fronts are sharpening and polarising. The fact that the climate crisis and resulting policy affect all our futures, makes the whole topic highly emotionally charged. Thus, we find that the discussion about the climate crisis must not only be approached from the quantitative side, but also from the qualitative, emotional side.
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.