6th European Climate Change Adaptation 

 Conference 2023 

 June 19th - 21st 

 Dublin, Ireland 


Critical Climate Machine (Leaves Orchestra): Sounds of Debunking and Live Data-stream at ECCA2023

The art installation will take place at the Dublin Castle from 20-21 June, 2023

Artists: Gaëtan Robillard and Victor Guichard

Critical Climate Machine is a research based project that quantifies and reveals the mechanisms of misinformation on global warming. Here, the exhibition consists of a sound installation and a data visualization witnessing misleading arguments detected on Twitter. A live data-stream performance titled Leaves Orchestra is specially featured.

In the sound installation, several dialogues circulate: false arguments about climate change confront their refutations. These voices were recorded during several workshops, in the course of which a card game specially designed for the project fostered climate literacy and debate. Later, the dialogues were reinterpreted and spatialized through a generative machine learning model conceived for musical improvisation. 

If via cognitive sciences, computational logic helps to discern the truth, the sound piece explores new digital mediation frameworks for the climate, opening up to deliberation. Critical Climate Machine acts as a counterpoint to the determinism of technical automation, while mitigating the circulation of deceptive claims and bringing forward the ethics of data processing. 

Leaves Orchestra is a performance based on a large set of sounds highlighting ecological data resulting from scientific observations of the Amazonian forest. The data was collected by The Sustainable Amazon Network, an organization of more than 30 institutions, including Oxford University. Leaves Orchestra’s primary goal is to bring a new look at the characteristics, state and essence of natural environment, inviting the viewer to discover a hidden world of stimuli. 

Biographies.

Gaëtan Robillard is an artist and a post-doctoral researcher from Laval University in Canada. He produces data art and media based installations engaging with mathematical research, climatology and cognitive sciences.

Victor Guichard is a student from IMAC engineer program, in Gustave Eiffel University in France. He is also a musician and live coding artist performing internationally. Support Critical Climate Machine is part of the Media Futures project, and has received funding from the European Union’s framework Horizon 2020 for research and innovation program under grant agreement No 951962.

Read more about the Critical Climate Machine here 

More information about the ECCA2023 programme here