The aesthetic turn in IR: from the margins to the aestheticisation of global politics

During the last couple of decades, IR scholarship has produced some of the most seminal contributions towards the understanding of the role of aesthetic knowledge in global governance. This section summarises key perspectives in this literature, while highlighting some of its blind spots and areas that this article attempts to analytically push further.

Perhaps one of the most influential writers on aesthetics in IR is Roland Bleiker, whose 2001 article ‘The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory’ set the tone for the power of aesthetic analyses of international politics, from conflicts to famines, diplomatic summits, and global fora.Footnote ⁹ Bleiker condemns the one-sided search for ‘facts’ in world politics as offering only a single, limited and limiting, view of the complexity of global events; instead, his article ‘argues for the need to validate an entirely different approach to the study of world politics: aesthetics’.Footnote ¹⁰ The article sets out its argument through contrasting what Bleiker calls mimetic versus aesthetic theories of representation: mimetic representations strive to present facts, negating the very act of re-presentation and therefore interpretation itself. According to Bleiker, mimetic approaches ‘uphold the notion of a neutral observer and a corresponding separation of object and subject’.Footnote ¹¹ Aesthetic approaches, on the contrary,

Post 9/11 and the increasing salience of aesthetics that followed it, Bleiker wrote the monograph ‘Aesthetics and World Politics’,Footnote ¹³ in which, moving beyond the dominance of visual imagery, he explores the role of the ‘poetic imagination’ as a way of analysing the role of language in representing the world:

Similar to Bleiker, a number of IR scholars wrote persuasively about the power of poetry and literature to serve as interpretative lenses into world politics, for example Costas ConstantinouFootnote ¹⁵ and Nevzat Soguk.Footnote ¹⁶ Additionally, analyses that focused more on literature, narratives and storytelling as aesthetic representations of global events also emerged.Footnote ¹⁷ One of the most prominent accounts of the influence of literature on the shape of world politics is the genre of travel writing; Debbie Lisle’s work on traveloguesFootnote ¹⁸ shows how authors such as Paul Theroux blend the literary and documentary genres and thus shape political discourses in ways that may depict certain world regions as more or less developed than others and thus reinforce discourses of Us versus Them. Returning to Bleiker,Footnote ¹⁹ he highlights contemporary IR analysis of how fiction can be a useful lens on colonial and post-colonial relationships, showing, through the work of Philip DarbyFootnote ²⁰ for example, but also multiple others, how literature has both played a role in representing and often justifying colonialism, as well as served as a space of transgression, by telling the stories of everyday people from a view ‘of the ground’, which is often different from the grand narratives that shape how we know the world.

Above all, IR literature has contributed substantially to an exploration of the ways the visual dimension of art, and associated forms such as videos or filmmaking have been key in creating representations of major world events,Footnote ²¹ often dominating the way we remember and talk about wars and conflicts: films such as Apocalypse Now, Forrest Gump, Good Morning Vietnam, and Platoon are only a few examples of the ways the Vietnam War has been shaped in collective memory and public discourse through artistic forms. In addition, IR scholars have written extensively about the political role of museums, art, and exhibition-making;Footnote ²² the role of photography;Footnote ²³ and even children’s art: for example, Claudia Aradau and Andrew Hill’s analysis of children’s drawings of the Darfur conflictFootnote ²⁴ is an eloquent case study of the role of visuality as ‘both an aesthetic and social object’.Footnote ²⁵ In this article, Aradau and Hill discuss how such aesthetic modes of knowledge production go well beyond the performative and are considered testimony and evidence within both the ‘fact positivism’ of legal evidentiary rules and, more importantly, into evidencing and communicating the social and political context of the children’s suffering and humanitarian needs. Further, Anna Leander’s work on aesthetics of global security highlights its commercial/marketing logics as significant factors that increase securitisication’s reach and attractiveness.Footnote ²⁶ Leander’s article with Jonathan Luke Austin on ‘aesthetic protocols’Footnote ²⁷ is a key study informing this article: according to the authors, the aestheticisation of global security mediates the horrors of war, crime, and insecurity as characteristics of life happening far away from the Global North and thus increase Western exceptionalism, exclusion, and, ultimately, inaction. Finally, Hannah Chapuisat’s thesis on ‘Policy-oriented art: developing disaster displacement norms in diplomatic venues’Footnote ²⁸ examines how art is used towards international norm development, especially in relation to displacement due to climate change.

Although IR scholarship has eloquently captured the aestheticisation of international challenges and agendas over the period of the last twenty to thirty years, the aesthetic turn in IR appears to stubbornly continue to focus upon artistic forms that remain broadly visual/cognitive and thus illustrative of reality, instead of capturing the aesthetic through its fully sensory dimension, at once within and out of this world. Although aesthetic analysis in IR, appearing slowly at the margins at the turn of the century, has become essential to the interpretation of the politics and practices of global events, we observe an emphasis on cinematic, photographic, or fictional representations of real-world events, as if the aesthetic only matters as an additional evidentiary element depicting harsh, yet often seemingly exotic, realities. Although seen as moving, both in emotional and agonistic terms, IR analysis still broadly sees art as a channel for the more vivid and affective communication of events in distant lands. In doing so, this literature has so far missed the essence and power of the artistic field to construct heterotopias; that is, it has missed art’s ability to produce worlds within worlds that, as I will show further, allow the momentary reconciliation of diverse perspectives towards ostensibly common goals. Hence, although this article builds on aesthetic IR, it advances this literature further through an exploration of the potential of aesthetics as a locus of expert knowledge-making for the global governance of sustainability. If art could be seen as a space for the emergence of a different kind of expertise, as Anna Leander explored in her interview with Donatella Della Ratta’s creative work in Syria,Footnote ²⁹ what is its role in producing alternative knowledge for the global governance of sustainability? More specifically, building on the IR literature on the role of the aesthetic in shaping global politics, what is the role of art in shaping the science and politics informing negotiations at mega-events such as the COPs?

Sensitising concepts and study design

It is not only IR literature that has discussed the central role of aesthetics in representing the social: art and aesthetics have historically been seen as key influences in the production of scientific knowledgeFootnote ³⁰ and, as a result, have been a core concern for a range of disciplines and fields, from STS to philosophy, to the sociology of art. This section discusses the theoretical scaffolding of the article: starting from STS, I will discuss the relevance of the notion of boundary objects to the paper’s argumentation. I will then move on to discuss the influence of aesthetic theory, paying particular attention to Rancière’s politics of aesthetics. Finally, I will offer some theoretical insights from the sociology of expertise, and show how analysis of the politics of expert knowledge production helps cast further light on the role of aesthetic knowledge in the global governance of sustainability.

Starting from the relevance of the STS’ focus on the material dimensions of scientific knowledge production, recent years have seen the emergence of a particular strand of STS work, Art and Science and Tecnology Studies (ASTS), that focuses on the production of knowledge and research through or in artworks.Footnote ³¹ According to Borgdorff et al., ‘artist-scholars in this field focus on the knowledge, understanding, and experiences enacted in creative processes and embodied in artistic products such as artworks, compositions, and performances.’Footnote ³² Similarly, Jones and Galison contend that ‘what much of the focus on “art” and “science” as discrete products ignores are the commonalities in the practices that produce them. Both are regimes of knowledge, embedded in, but also constitutive of, the broader cultures they inhabit’.Footnote ³³ In a similar vein, focusing more on the performativity and embodiment of knowledge production, John Law suggests that ‘knowing and its methods are materially complex and performative webs of practice’.Footnote ³⁴ Law, as a key proponent of the relevance of the arts to the production of knowledge, has eloquently described art/science collaborations as ‘hybrid knowing spaces’ that can achieve knowledge ‘that might be otherwise’.Footnote ³⁵

Building on Latour’s encouragement to ‘think with eyes and hands’,Footnote ³⁶ the article mobilises the concept of materiality reflected in the form of ‘boundary objects’, with the latter defined as ‘any object that is part of multiple social worlds and facilitates communication between them’.Footnote ³⁷ Boundary objects are particularly useful for this analysis, as they do not simply inhabit the margins; instead, they create shared and common spaces, where the here and there are confounded. Their materiality does not merely relate to their physical, observed qualities (although these, especially in the context of art, are significant, too). Rather, their materiality relates to their nature to both be generated by and help create embodied forms of knowledge.Footnote ³⁸ A key feature of boundary objects is that they enable ‘cooperative work in the absence of consensus’,Footnote ³⁹ allowing the unfolding of a ‘process through which actors from different social worlds…manage to coordinate with each other despite their differing points of view’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although, in the original use of the term, Star and GriesemerFootnote ⁴¹ discussed the role of boundary objects in scientific knowledge production, the notion has relevance to the field of global governance, particularly when examined in relation to the politics of such processes when, despite dissensus, ‘cooperation continues, often unproblematically’:Footnote ⁴² this is the context where boundary work takes place, to demarcate the field and compete over the possible interpretations assigned to the boundary object. Here, we follow Wenger, who suggested that ‘when a boundary object serves multiple constituencies, each has only partial control over the interpretation of the object’.Footnote ⁴³ As we will see, the article utilises the concept of boundary objects to explore the ways art works may offer their plasticity yet stability to create ‘hybrid knowing spaces’,Footnote ⁴⁴ where different audiences (artists, policymakers, citizens) assemble around. Needing to straddle such different logics and worlds, ‘boundary objects’ can carry seemingly contradictory qualities: like the two artworks analysed, they must be simultaneously concrete and abstract, fluid yet well defined. This kind of conflation is, as we know, very important in the making of the global governance of sustainable development, which requires both the bringing together of global concerns, values, and priorities with local and national challenges, and the offering of the promise of a utopian future while dealing with a dystopian present.Footnote ⁴⁵ The materiality of artworks as boundary objects is of the essence here, too: their material presence does not necessarily relate to their physical, observable entities; rather, materiality, here, entails ‘the stuff of action’, something that can be ‘embodied, voiced, printed, danced and named’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, building on STS, we ask: what are the boundary knowledge spaces with which policymakers engage to make decisions? Exploring art as a space of aesthetic knowledge and governance capitalises on the decades-long study of the entanglement of art and science by STSFootnote ⁴⁷ to examine if and how policymakers turn to art to develop techniques, values, and skills that may be less tangible than statistical data but still a crucial, yet so far unknown, part of the policy repertoire.

Second, Jacques Rancière’s work on the politics of aesthetics guides the study in relation to bridging art and politics as two forms of ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (‘le partage du sensible’Footnote ⁴⁸). By the ‘sensible’, Rancière refers to the sphere of perception as aesthetics: this is the science of Kantian ‘aesthesis’, meaning everything that is seen, heard, said, or felt in the social world. Both art and politics ‘distribute’ this world through processes of structuring, framing, identifying and contextualising; it is through this distribution that we come to know and change the world.Footnote ⁴⁹ Rancière suggests that politics and art may operate within their own systems; however, they do not exist in separate realities. On the contrary, they share the common aim of creating the conditions to overturn dominant hierarchies and power relations and bring about new forms of life.Footnote ⁵⁰ This is because the double meaning of the word ‘partage’, as distributing and partaking, allows for a reading of politics as dissensus: the democratic process of ‘perceiving and partaking, of portioning and sharing is what intimately links politics to aesthetics in Rancière’s thinking’.Footnote ⁵¹ Similar to Latour’s ideas about the lack of equal representation in decision-making, and following Rancière, one could suggest that ‘the distribution of the sensible’ in relation to climate change, for example, has for many decades excluded environmental collapse from the perceived (the ‘sensible’) in world politics, in favour of prioritising other concerns such as economic growth or geopolitical interests.

Further, Rancière attempted to break the boundaries between art and non-art, through his perspective of the continuity of the senses: for Rancière and his ‘aesthetic regime’, ‘art is constantly caught in a tension between being specifically art and merging with other forms of activity and being’.Footnote ⁵² Although the realm of the ‘sensible’ is defined by rules and norms that appear to clearly separate the artistic from the rational, the Rancièrian ‘aesthetic regime’, without implying that art and life are synonymous, supports that, nonetheless, ‘they grow out of the same soil, that of aesthetic experience of time and space that mingles practical intentions with playful ones and temporarily suspends their distinction’.Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, few aspects of governing global challenges, not to mention governance itself, are devoid of aesthetics: the actual and the virtual have come to blur time and space to such a degree that perceptions, sensations and affects mingle and constantly reshape and shift what it means to be in-common in the world. According to Rancière, democratic politics is about capturing the opportunity for ‘commoning’ to bring about change. Nonetheless, according to him, ‘a political community is not the realisation of a common essence or the essence of the common. It is the sharing of what is not given as being in-common: between the visible and the invisible, the near and the far, the present and the absent’.Footnote ⁵⁴ For Rancière, art bridges politics in that they both strive to create fractures, discontinuities, and reconfigurations to give voice to the excluded, the invisible, the in-between. In that regard, art, by being both in and out of this world and through the ‘capacities that it sets in motion’, is politics: it allows for the momentary suspension of reality and the re-imagining of new worlds, and new ways of being in common. Rancière’s work, in conjunction with the notion of boundary projects, is central to an exploration of what the presence of art in large global fora offers to the political process, both in terms of democratising and pluralising knowledge-making, and in relation to creating space for imagining different worlds.

Finally, the third body of work I draw upon is the sociology of expertise, and particularly work on recent shifts in the production of authoritative knowledge for policyFootnote ⁵⁵ (Littoz-Monnet et al., this issue). Although the reliance on technocratic modes of expert knowledge-making continues apace, the last decade has seen a parallel development towards opening up the spaces of authoritative knowledge-making to more plural forms, such as experiential, tacit, or aesthetic knowledge. The reasons for this shift are multiple: from the 2008 global financial crisis and the failure of economic modelling to predict it, to critiques against expert elites (with the infamous ‘we have had enough of experts’ quote from the British conservative politician and Brexiteer Michael Gove), we can observe a ‘cultural turn’, where technocratic expertise, despite its dominance and claims to objectivity, has also paradoxically been accompanied by the rise of a range of alternative cognitive and sense-making forms, from storytelling, to visuals and other embodied, ‘lived’, and sensory approaches.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such developments may be interpreted in multiple ways, both as ways of democratising and pluralising knowledge forms, as well as ‘popularising’ data by giving it meaning. Although seemingly different from the work of numbers, these shifts have arguably strengthened the ability of number-making to become ever more entrenched and inescapable as a mode of policy problematisation and change.Footnote ⁵⁷ Regardless of the reasons for this shift, and in conjunction with the failings of evidence-making policy to bring about impactful policy change, there is an increasing trend to move towards alternative sources of knowledge-making; one way of doing so, as this article discusses, is through building on aesthetics as the interdisciplinary art of ‘sensitive knowing’.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Littoz and her colleagues in this issue suggest, these developments show the rise of a different kind of ‘epistemic politics at play’ where such ‘novel claims and practices’ of knowledge authority-making are not superficial or side-shows any longer, but have become ‘an integral part of the technocratic repertoire of knowledge production and expertise’Footnote ⁵⁹ (forthcoming). According to them, the repertoire of knowledge authorisation practices and processes has led to knowledge-making that is ‘inclusive, timely, correct, benevolent and creative or aesthetic’. Footnote ⁶⁰ Although this article focuses primarily on the aesthetic elements of expert knowledge, the analysis will show that it is at the intersections of aesthetics with the key qualities of contemporary expert knowledge forms that the aestheticisation of knowledge-making takes place: that is, through its interaction with objectivity, but also its more inclusive and timely elements.

Finally, in terms of the empirical investigation, I follow a case study design, utilising multiple data sources (in the form of web searches, documents, and media and video analyses), to explore two cases of aesthetic knowledge production, both produced and exhibited at large international UN COP meetings. Case study analysis is particularly apt for exploring phenomena within context, especially when the phenomena under study and their context do not have clearly demarcated boundaries. The two specific cases under investigation were selected on the basis of their popularity in traditional and social media mentions, as well as the complementarity of the elements they displayed in terms of the analytical purposes of the study. It is to these two cases that I will now turn.

Visualising climate change: art at the COPs

From the very first COP in Berlin in 1995 all the way to the last COP (COP30) in Belém in 2025, art and artists have always been present at COPs. Though closely interdependent, two types of COPs were established at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit: the ‘main’ Climate COP, run by the supreme decision-making body or the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the biodiversity COP, established by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The UNFCCC COPs take place annually (with the exception of the pandemic year 2020), whereas the CBD COP takes place biannually.

Although COPs have been criticised for the lack of radical action to protect the climate and biodiversity,Footnote ⁶¹ COP meetings have been the fora of some of the most important international climate and biodiversity commitments, such as the Kyoto Protocol (COP3 1997), the Copenhagen Accord (COP15, 2009), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) (CBD COP15 Montreal) and the Paris Agreement (COP21, 2015). According to TsouvalisFootnote ⁶² and McMahon,Footnote ⁶³ art has become a core aspect of the organisation of COPs, both in relation to the commissioned artworks present in the COP discussion spaces, as well as the ‘artivism’ that extends public engagement across the COP cities. Although art that takes the form of COP activism is a key dimension to understanding the public debate around COPs and their relative successes and failures, here, we focus primarily on commissioned artworks that were presented in the COP discussion spaces, as those contributing directly to expert knowledge production and the aesthetics of global sustainability governance.

Econario and the production of aesthetic knowledge for biodiversity

As part of the work of CBD COP15 in Montreal in 2022, UNESCO, in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in London, commissioned the Dutch eco-artist Thijs Biersteker to create Econario (Figure 1), a three-dimensional data visualisation sculpture.

Figure 1.

Econario at COP15.

Source: SDG Knowledge Hub (2026). Photo credit: Lynn Wagner.

Displayed prominently in the Nature Positive Pavilion, at the main COP conference hall, Econario represented a five-metre-tall robotic plant made from recycled steel. Using data on biodiversity loss, Econario could open and close its steel petals, move, and change, illustrating how political decisions can impact biodiversity at present and in the future. Based on a command input by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin team from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD-ENB), live data ‘fed’ to the ‘plant’ transformed it into an interactive visual that could manifest the impact of key decisions taken in the negotiations’ room in real-time: that is, depending on how the discussions would go, the plant could either grow or shrink, illustrating how political decisions during COP15 would impact biodiversity in the coming years.

Specifically, the data that would determine the growth or death of the plant were derived from the Biological Intactness Index (BII); the latter calculates a percentage based on an estimation of the number of species and their abundance in an ecosystem depending on the status of negotiations. The BII was developed by scientists at the UK Natural History Museum using the PREDICTS global database,Footnote ⁶⁴ bringing together millions of data points in over 100 countries. Apart from determining the behaviour of the plant in real time, the BII data would also feed into the development of five scenarios to assess the future impact of the issues under negotiation at COP15. The first scenario, ‘SSP1: Sustainability (taking the green road)’, represented a situation in which negotiators demonstrated a commitment to achieving the SDGs and prioritised human health over economic development. The second scenario, ‘SSP2: Middle of the Road’, estimated the situation in which the negotiated outcomes would perpetuate social, economic, and technological trends according to their historic pathways. In this case, income inequality would continue, and so would societal ills and environmental disasters. With this scenario, slow progress towards the SDGs is achieved and, although energy use decreases, environmental systems become degraded. The third scenario, ‘SSP3: Regional Rivalry (a rocky road)’, had the worst BII outcome, posing serious threats to ecosystems around the world. This scenario predicted that nationalism, security, and conflict would lead countries to focus on local issues and neglect the environment. The other two scenarios, ‘SSP4: Inequality (a road divided)’ and ‘SSP5: Fossil-fuelled Development (taking the highway)’, illustrated BII estimations in-between the first three scenarios. Econario was accompanied by interactive screens that provided information on the scenario the plant was representing during the negotiations, as well as allowed viewers to dive deeper into the data presented by the Natural History Museum. In addition to seeing the fullness of Econario when its branches and leaves were fully extended, or its relative collapse when the branches and leaves pulled in, the viewer could examine the data inputs that a BII of 90% represents (a resilient and functioning ecosystem) versus a BII of 30% or lower (an ecosystem in danger of collapse).

Thus, it is clear that not only was Econario largely dependent on an infrastructure of statistical measurement, but it also made the engagement with biodiversity data far more playful, flexible, and palpable than any other more traditional visual would ever have done: looking at it, complex data could be communicated ‘at a glance’. More than that, Econario offered multivocality and interpretive flexibility: according to Meyer et al., ‘the lack of a clear visual “syntax” makes visual meaning fluid and indeterminate and strongly dependent on the viewers interpretative predispositions’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Through the display and comparison of the different future ‘scenarios’, Econario’s aesthetic elements were actively producing new ways of seeing and knowing biodiversity, both further legitimising scientific data as the ‘single source of truth’ while offering the delegates ‘a change in the regime of re-presentation’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Despite the sophisticated data inputs that would affect the plantanoid sculpture in real time, perhaps even more impressive were the vocal reactions to the three-dimensional artistic/scientific visualisation by the conference participants, experts, and national representatives. According to Andy Purvis, a biodiversity researcher at the Natural History Museum,

I am blown away by this piece. The numbers around biodiversity loss are cold hard facts, but cold hard facts never grabbed anyone by the heart. With ‘Econario’, you feel joy when it grows and becomes more natural; and you feel pain when it wilts. It has soul. And it really brings home what’s at stake.Footnote ⁶⁷

Using the movements of this robotic plantanoid – either flourishing or withering – created a strong affective mood in the conference space that underscored the role that art can play when it translates complex data to aid decision-making. By affect, I refer to the energetic vibrancy or agency of matter that exists before it is possible to consciously label it as a specific emotion; it is part and parcel of the entanglement that has brought art and science closely together historically and today. Instead of approaching scientific knowledge as a pre-established, objective, and single ‘truth’, artworks emphasise the material-discursive entanglements of nature and culture and highlight the material, cultural, social, and embodied intensitiesFootnote ⁶⁸ of the negotiation room. UNESCO representatives reacted to the piece with excitement, since their support of the artwork became strong evidence of the role that aesthetic knowledge-making can have for the global governance of biodiversity. According to Meriem Bouamrane, Chief of Section MAB Research and Policy,

Strengthening the dialogue between science and culture is at the heart of the UNESCO mandate. Econario artistic work based on scientific data allows everyone to see the tangible commitments of the Parties for biodiversity. We hope it can raise the need for urgent action to conserve the living fabric of life that we all depend on.Footnote ⁶⁹

Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, was enthusiastic about the artwork and its potential to communicate the urgency and importance of climate action:

This powerful installation translates complex scientific data into a simple, yet profound message regarding the immediate impact of decisions made on our environmentFootnote ⁷⁰

As if the presence of Econario at the conference was not powerful enough in itself, the artist Thijs Biersteker was given the podium to address the audience with his own analysis and messaging about his artwork (Figures 2 and 3). In his talk (available online here), he made an emotive plea for scientists and artists to work closer together in order to address the lack of imagination and feeling in these global decision-making spaces. His address made a big impression on the audience, so much so that the UN made some of his words the ‘quote of the day’ for the whole conference:

Art can make science communicate. It can make it resonate. It can make it understandable. It can make it relatable, and it can make it personal. That is the key to what we should be doing right now in this time and age. Science has been there alone with the facts for too long.… If the research does not reach us, then how can the research teach us?Footnote ⁷¹ (Biersteker 2025)

Figure 2.

Thijs Biersteker speaking at COP15. Stills from video sourced from YouTube.

Figure 3.

Thijs Biersteker speaking at COP15. Stills from video sourced from YouTube.

In conclusion, according to the artist and scientists who produced it, Econario offered COP15 ‘a thermometer’:Footnote ⁷² that is, it created a liminal space between the rationality of numbers and affectivity towards a dying planet.

Polar zero and fusing art/science for knowledge-making

‘Polar Zero’ (Figure 4) was an exhibition presented by a collaboration of partners, including the BAS, the engineering company Arup, the Royal College of Art, and the UK’s AHRC, at the Glasgow Science Centre as part of the Glasgow Climate Summit COP26 (October–November 2021). Polar Zero aimed to showcase the bridging of ‘scientific and artistic leadership’, representing, as the relevant BAS video production suggested, a fusion of art, science, and engineering.

Figure 4.

Still from the POLAR ZERO video, directed by Ben Richardson (2021).

The centrepiece of this exhibition was the art installation 1765 – Antarctic Air, produced by the British artist Wayne Binitie, in collaboration with the glaciologist Dr Robert Mulvaney at BAS, who extracted an ice core from the Atlantic from the year 1765, when James Watt invented the steam engine, the landmark year when steam began slowly to be used on an industrial scale:

What we’ve chosen is the year 1765 which is the year that James Watt, a Scottish inventor improved the steam engine by such an extent that it started being taken up by and used for industrial processes. And almost immediately the atmosphere responded. Within a few years of the steam engine being invented, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere began to rise. We only know this because we can get the old atmosphere from the ice.…Tree rings or stalactites in caves or peat bogs or corals or marine sediments -these all remember about something from the past in their chemistry or their physical makeup. But the thing about the ice that’s completely unique is these trapped bubbles of air.Footnote ⁷³

The art installation involved two pieces, presented in juxtaposition to one another: on the one hand, a glass sculpture displayed trapped bubbles of clean air from 1765, coupled with the sound of their popping projected in the room. On the other hand, an ice cylinder, extracted from an ice core from the Antarctic, was presented as melting and dripping away, creating another simultaneous sound effect in the exhibition space. Both objects, presented together, produced a visual and sonic experience that aimed to bring together ‘the human and non-human’, questioning ‘what is core in our relationship with the environment’Footnote ⁷⁴ and thus represented the fragility of the polar regions and all associated problems of rising sea water levels globally.

According to Robert Mulvaney, the scientist supporting Binitie behind the making of the installation, the double sound of the clean 1765 air bubbles, popping alongside the contemporary ice dripping, creates a sound experience that is immediate and deeply engaging: while ‘the ice (is) melting away, time (is) ticking away’.Footnote ⁷⁵ According to the Arup engineer who supported the extraction of the air bubbles and their insertion into the glass sculpture (Figure 5), presenting the sculpture alongside the contemporary ice core creates a direct and striking comparison between the two times in human history, and leads to a reflective moment about the ways in which man-made climate change has impacted the planet and the polar regions in particular.

Figure 5.

A close-up of the ampoule of genuine Antarctic air from the year 1765 is encased in a cylindrical glass sculpture, fusing art, science, and engineering. Copyright BAS (https://www.Bas.Ac.Uk/project/data-as-art/polar-aesthetics/polar-zero/).

Polar Zero, therefore, represents a prime example of art/science collaboration, in the long tradition of enlisting artists to foster public understanding and engagement with science and to reach new audiences, in order to generate not only cognitive but crucially affective involvement.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, more than utilising art to popularise science, the artwork itself appears to gain increased legitimacy and evocative power, given its rootedness in scientific analysis and the months-long research and analysis the artists conducted, taking the form of a certain kind of ‘legitimacy exchange’,Footnote ⁷⁷ where both the aesthetic and the scientific knowledge regimes gain differently from their symbiosis.

Indeed, Wayne Binitie in his description of his work with the BAS, describes his art as research conducted alongside the ‘laboratory’ in order to add more poetic ways of producing knowledge for climate change policymaking (Figure 6). His work is deeply informed by documentary analysis of the work of the BAS, as well as ‘recorded interviews and oral testimony by climate scientists’ that will add to the development of ‘a sensory, narrative, and atmospheric approach to writing and making’. According to Binitie,

My research makes an original contribution to knowledges of the laboratory and argues that a material experience of these artworks enables and encourages a deep consideration of the fragile glacial past, present and future.Footnote ⁷⁸

Figure 6.

A triptych of images of the 1765 sculpture at Polar Zero for COP26. Copyright BAS (https://www.Bas.Ac.Uk/project/data-as-art/polar-aesthetics/polar-zero/).

Above all, Wayne Binitie described the art installation as intending to provoke thoughts and feelings in relation to climate change:

When people walk in, we want them to give themselves the opportunity to pause, to reflect and discover that, for all its high tech and ancient qualities, there is a meditative quality about the work that would allow people to both think and feel. So I guess we’d want people to go away with a greater awareness of our relationship to the past, present and future.Footnote ⁷⁹

What Polar Zero achieves, it seems, is not only to bring science closer to the public and thus increase scientific reach and accountability but also to create stronger links with industry and ultimately effect policy change through art’s persuasive, affective, and paedagogic elements. According to Dame Jo da Silva, Global Director of Sustainability at Arup,

Art is I think very important because it is an encapsulation of a lot of complexity. A subject like climate change which is so incredibly complex, you need to engage with s… emotionally. The challenge that we are all facing at this moment is learning faster than the world is changing around us. Art is an enjoyable way of learning.Footnote ⁸⁰

In a similar fashion, Dr Paul Thompson, the vice-chancellor of the Royal College of Art, suggested the immediate connection that the art installation had with the COP26 participants:

Wayne Binitie’s time capsule of the Earth’s atmosphere from the year 1765 captures all the magical curiosity of an insect fossilised in amber. A pre-industrial world, frozen in glass, provokes powerful emotions and demands a call to action from delegates at COP26.Footnote ⁸¹

Why was the art installation considered so successful in terms of communicating the message of the fragility of ecosystems and the urgency to act? According to da Silva, the aim here was to produce behavioural change as a result of the encounter with the artwork. The installation 1765 – Antarctic Air produced a different kind of knowledge that, although informed by science and made possible by engineering, had the affective and inquisitive elements that can ignite alternative ways of being and acting in the world:

We change behaviour because we see the world differently. One of the really important things about art is that we have that a-ha moment. We react to it emotionally and our brain processes our feelings and our thoughts, maybe the information that’s given to us, and we might walk out of an installation and think ‘oh’ and as result of that ‘oh’ we start thinking differently and then we do things differently.Footnote ⁸²

In terms of visibility and reach, the exhibition was visited by around 35,000 visitors and received wide-reaching international media coverage. According to the description of the project outcomes by UK Research and Innovation AHRC’s, the coverage ‘supported each of the objectives of the project and brought its innovative and powerful message about climate change to a potential audience of hundreds of millions’,Footnote ⁸³ including hard-to-reach communities. In other words, in addition to the COP delegates meeting onsite, the COP26 message travelled far and wide through online media that reached many thousands of young people, as well as gained support from key stakeholders in government and policy, such as the official account of the Secretary of State for Scotland and influential media personalities from the BBC and other media outlets. Finally, the piece was seen as creating more links and opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration, bringing together arts researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers.