Climatic Reflector

This work is an immersive signage using big data on climate change. By capturing point cloud data of the viewer into the video, the work exposes the recursive relationship between climate and the viewer. The concept is: see yourself looking at the visualization of climate change. What viewers see is not only the visualization of climate change using big data, but also themselves looking at the visualization. This is inspired by the “middle voice” that existed in Proto-Indo-European language. This voice is intermediate between the active and the passive. It is a voice that deals with cases where one’s action (verb) affects not only to the object of the action but also to oneself (subject). The viewers themselves are also captured as point cloud data. The viewer who watches this will be reenacting climate change and their own middle voice state for themselves.

Various open big data on climate change are used in this work: 66 years of phenological observation data from the Japan Meteorological Agency, specific CFCs accumulated in the ocean over the past 60 years from Applied Physics Laboratory of University of Washington, NASA Ozone Watch’s 42 years of Antarctic ozone hole observations, and MERIT DEM’s revised Copernicus sentinel data.

This work was exhibited in a shopping district in Sapporo, Japan, in February 2024. Using public signage that normally displays advertisements, immersive audiovisual experience was installed. Through this practice, a cultural infrastructure that triggers educational and introspective behaviors was examined.

This work is the result of a four-year collaboration between Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Integrated Design Center and Keio University Akira Wakita Laboratory. Mitsubishi Electric is a company that builds highly public infrastructure. The collaboration between the two is an experiment in building a new cultural infrastructure using visualization based on art and science.