Jinyong Lee

DataCanvas: Painting a Sustainable Tomorrow

In ‘The era of resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth’, Rifkin highlighted the advantage of a resilient society in adaptation to climate change by declaring that the world is currently transitioning from an era of progress to an era of resilience. To build a resilient society, he called action for technological innovation in areas such as energy and the internet, as well as reform of the financial and education systems.[6] His perspective inspired me to plan a project to generate public interest in infrastructure construction and technological innovation because I learned that transition from efficiency to adaptability is essential element of a resilient society.  

Through my creative project, which involves writing code and using my own program to produce data artwork, I combined essential elements for building a resilient society, such as technological innovation, infrastructure construction, and public interest in environmental science with aspects of interactivity in art, such as stimulation of emotion, simplified expression of esoteric concepts, and audience engagement.

In ‘The Climate Book’, Thunberg points out that people have not considered enough about what impact climate change will bring on future society, but she still suggest hopes that every problem will be solved at the moment when enough amount of people decide to take actions.[1] By providing scientific data and perspectives on every topic regarding climate change, she suggests evidence based solutions for people who wants to take actions.

In the book ‘The Arctic in the Anthropocene: Emerging Research Questions’, the national research council point out that science promotes fundamental understanding of climate change phenomena and suggests evidence-based solutions, but there is currently no link between science and policy.[2] This explains what obstacles exist to the hopes proposed by Thunberg.

We can find hints on how to overcome this situation and ensure that scientific discoveries lead to the establishment of policy in Malcolm Miles' “SOCIETY AS A WORK OF ART: Herbert Marcuse and Joseph Beuys in a Period of Hope,”. In SOCIETY AS A WORK OF ART, Joseph Beuys believed that everyone has a creative imagination and this can be enhanced through education. According to his philosophy, through an education, people will be able to envision new social and aesthetic realities. With their creative vision and imagination, people have chance to create new reality.[4] Combining the National Science Council's criticism and Beuys' perspective, the reason scientific discoveries do not lead to policy establishment and social change is because people did not have chance to grow abilities to imagine a new social reality based on the knowledge they learned.

In artwork Training for the Future (2019) and artwork Ice Watch (2015), the artists both provide people concrete and tangible experiences of what the future reality will look like by showing melting glaciers and providing practical training to adapt to climate change. Through these works, I was able to gain inspiration that the audience's engagement is unique element of art, which can promotes the audience's free imagination about the future and translate scientific knowledge into public policy.

In ‘Art and Climate change’, Maja Fowkes contrasts two different approaches to a resilient future and proposes that reflecting on the past and developing future technology to prepare for the future both contribute to a resilient society. In T1/2 (2019) and in Seasteaders (2018), the artists address that reflection on the past and adaptation to the future are two important elements that contribute to a resilient society. They address this message by using unique mediums such as an abandoned nuclear reactor and a seastead.[5]

In T1/2, the artist addresses the message that technology used without considering the environment leaves long lasting scar on future generations by using unique medium of abandoned nuclear reactor in Eastern Europe used during the Cold War. The name of her work T1/2 is the half-life of used radioactive energy source. Furthermore, she visualizes the criticism of the era of progress which pursued only efficiency.

In Seasteaders, the artist photographs a seastead that is built by Paypal's founder to adapt to a future in which sea levels rise and secure sufficient habitat, and through this, presents a blueprint for the construction of infrastructure capable of adapting to climate change and an era of resilience. By visualizing these new attempts, artist refutes the public's climate grief and present a vision for resilient future.

In the article ‘NASA Data Aids Ozone Hole's Journey to Recovery’, NASA introduces how their visual and artistic representations of climate issues have become a smoking gun leading to a large-scale transition in infrastructure and international treaty, thereby transforming scientific data into artistic solutions.[3] It has been proven that expressing it as can encourage public understanding and participation. When meteorologists and astronomers first detected depletion of the ozone layer, the public and media were not interested in the issue because they did not want to give up the refrigerant benefits they were enjoying. However, NASA's image, which expressed the image of the depleted ozone layer through color, simultaneously conveyed to the public the seriousness of the problem and the urgency of its solution, which immediately led to public political demands and international consensus. This suggests that artistic expression is better than scientific explanation. It proves that it causes the audience to feel greater emotional stimulation and allows them to accept the problem more quickly and take action.

In Composition with Red Blue and Yellow(1930), and First Disk (1913), artists express their emotions, thoughts, and philosophies using simple formative elements, stimulating the audience's imagination and allowing them to attempt various interpretations. In my artwork, I adopted this abstract style of expression because the abstract approach stimulates the audience's imagination, allowing the audience to simultaneously imagine the tragic future brought about by climate change and the hopeful resilient future society that public participation can create.

Inspired by Tempestry project (2016), I learned that expressing various climate-related data as a continuous spectrum of colors provides rich visual stimulation to the audience, and through this, the audience is deeply impressed by the seriousness of climate change. Therefore, I wrote a computer program that converts climate change data into a color spectrum and helps you apply this color spectrum to desired backgrounds and designs. When using this program, users first select climate data that they consider significant or worthy of public attention. Afterwards, they can create artwork by converting this data into a spectrum of colorful colors and overlaying it with the design they want, such as a symbolic image. Polar Bear Tears (2023) is the first data art piece I created using this program. I cited annual global temperature data from 1980 to 2022 from NOAA's website and converted it to a color spectrum ranging from blue to red. And I overlaid this spectrum on the shadow of a polar bear, an endangered species that symbolizes the disappearance of glaciers and the collapse of the Arctic ecosystem. My project helps individuals interested in environmental science, especially citizen scientists, to artistically express the climate data they collect when they believe it deserves more social attention. Through artistic expression, they can transform data that is difficult for the public to interpret into a simple form and convey it to the audience. Additionally, the emotional stimulation provided by artwork increases the audience's acceptance of the message and the possibility of putting it into practice in daily life.

For anyone who wants to check out my program, you can access to https://github.com/ok000826/art_history_fianlproject/tree/main

I released this to the public as open source code, so you can always copy and use my code through this website.

Images

Fig. 1, Emilija Skarnulyte, T1/2, Picture, Lithuania, 2019

Fig. 2, Jonas Staal, Training for the future, Performance, Bochum, Germany 2019

Fig. 3, Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch, 2014, Installation, Place du Panthéon, Paris, 2015

Fig.4 Robert Delaunay, First Disk, Paris, France, 1913

Fig. 5 Pieter Mondrian, Composition II with Red Blue and Yellow, oil painting, Netherland, 1930

Fig.6 Daniel Keller, Jacob Hurwitz, Seasteaders, photography, United States, 2018

Fig. 7  Tempestry Project. Tempestries for Utqiagvik, Alaska and Death Valley, California, Fabric, United States, 2016

Fig 8. Jinyong Lee. Polar Bear Tears, digital, United States, 2023

Works Cited

[1]THUNBERG, GRETA. Climate book. S.l.: ALLEN LANE, 2025.

[2] The Arctic in the anthropocene: Emerging research questions. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2014.

[3] Evans, Jessica. “NASA Data AIDS Ozone Hole’s Journey to Recovery.” NASA, July 26, 2023. https://www.nasa.gov/earth-and-climate/nasa-data-aids-ozone-holes-journey-to-recovery/.

[4] Miles, Malcom. “SOCIETY AS A WORK OF ART Herbert Marcuse and Joseph Beuys in a Period of Hope”. Arken Museum of Modern Art, 2012

[5] Fowkes, Maja, and Reuben Fowkes. Art and climate change. London: Thames and Hudson, 2022.

[6] Rifkin, Jeremy. The age of resilience: Reimagining existence on a Rewilding Earth. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2022.