EAC and Science On a Sphere® (SOS) co-commissioned a collaboration to co-create spherical film shorts for SOS to help people experience global change personally. Commissioned artists were new media artist/composer Michael Theodore and filmmaker/visual artist Jeanne Liotta; advising scientists were Carol Wessman, Elizabeth Weatherhead, Pieter Tans, Max Boykoff, and Susan Buhr, among others. SOS is a global video display system that projects images on a six-foot diameter sphere, installed in facilities worldwide.

Usually SOS films and visual displays have shown Earth Science and other images such as solar storms, the surface of Mars, worldwide patterns of air traffic, etc., with or without a docent, and are displayed in science centers, natural history museums, and the like. At the time, SOS was installed in more than 115 science and other facilities worldwide with an annual audience of 33 million. Science/art collaborations for the SOS sphere — which presents its own technical challenges for projecting on a globe instead of a flat surface — were few and far between.

Questions explored for this project were:

• How can science and art inform and inspire each other to help people experience global change personally?
• Can we close the gap between facts and feelings, information and action in response to some of the most important issues facing humanity?
• How might the arts – and its realm of metaphors, images, storytelling, and emotions be an ally for science – and its realm of data, numbers, analysis, and intellect?

The full project was a year long exploration by the artists about topics they were interested in, informed by advisory meetings with the scientists, culminating in the creation of two six-minute films for SOS and a panel discussion, premiered at and in collaboration with Fiske Planetarium in Boulder.

For his film, new media artist/composer Michael Theodore’s was inspired by Boulder’s 100-year flood and the double-edged sword of river flooding as both a devastating catastrophe and part of the necessary and natural cycle for restoring soil nutrients, fertility, forests, and vegetation.

Filmmaker/visual artist Jeanne Liotta was compelled by arctic melt, science visualizations, water color paintings, cli-fi (climate-fiction) book covers, and New York Times science articles.

The panel discussion included artists Liotta and Theodore and scientists Carol Wessman and Elizabeth Weatherhead, with co-moderators and Project Principal Investigators Shilpi Gupta (SOS) and Marda Kirn (EcoArts Connections). The conversation included a discussion of the behind the scenes creation of the films, following the year-long exploration of the intersection of science and the arts that sparked national interest in expanding such collaborations in the future.

The film’s development, screening, and discussion at Fiske were the culminating event of the project “SOS: Cognition + Affect = Effect” developed through a collaboration between SOS, EcoArts Connections, artists, and scientists.

PANELIST, SCIENTISTS & MODERATORS

Jeanne Liotta http://www.jeanneliotta.net/

Michael Theodore http://michaeltheodore.info/

Dr. Elizabeth Weatherhead http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/weatherhead/

Dr. Carol Wessman http://cires.colorado.edu/people/wessman/#sthash.0gEd2hO8.dpuf

Shilpi Gupta www.sos.noaa.gov  |  www.shilpigupta.com

Marda Kirn https://www.ecoartsonline.com