Small Climates, Big Issues: Visualizing, sounding, touching, and reading microclimate data

Leonardo LASER Talks Bergen Forest ecologist and ecoinformatics researcher Robert Lewis (Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, NINA) and multidisciplinary artist Alinta Krauth come together to explore how microclimates and the data that reveal them, shape forests and, more broadly, the Earth’s future. Moving between ecological science and artistic practice, they ask how microclimate data can be interpreted, translated, and contested through interactive digital art, literature, and sound, and what this implies for science communication, public engagement, and environmental stewardship. The discussion draws on recent Nordic Forest Research (SNS) microclimate research and the artworks that followed from the Intimate Atmospheres exhibition, using these as a springboard to consider how environmental sensing can be reimagined through multiple ways of knowing. Join us to encounter the same concepts through two parallel lenses: the scientist’s aims and the artist’s eye. Robert Lewis Robert John Lewis is an ecologist and ecoinformatics researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA). His work sits at the intersection of biodiversity science, distributed sensing, and socio-technical design, with a dual focus: advancing understanding of how and why biodiversity is distributed across landscapes, and designing novel monitoring infrastructures that translate environmental intelligence into sustained, participatory environmental stewardship. Lewis develops initiatives that connect field sensors and edge AI with participatory governance. His current work spans Norwegian forest sensor deployments and the Biodiversa+ ForestWeb3 initiative, exploring how emerging technologies might democratise monitoring and sustain stewardship at scale. Alongside technical innovation, he is increasingly attentive to epistemic plurality: the idea that biodiversity knowledge is produced through multiple, situated ways of knowing. He is interested in making environmental intelligence more legible, emotionally resonant, and actionable, while fostering reconnection with the natural world. Alinta Krauth Alinta Krauth (PhD) is a new media artist and artistic researcher interested in digitally innovative connections between machine learning, animal intelligences, and interfaces. Her work often looks at topics related to interspecies relations and collaborations, including the creation of interactive artistic devices as a response to more-than-human agency, and the building of interactive and wearable devices for use by other species. More recently, she works to implement machine learning in practices such as digital art, digital storytelling, and immersive digital experiences. Her outcomes include award-winning innovations in the fields of digital art, digital poetics, and creative Artificial Intelligence, including commissions for OpenAI, fellowships with Leonardo ISAST/The Institute for Science and the Imagination, and shortlistings with Ars Electronica/S+T+Arts Prize. Her artworks have been seen at spaces such as large screens in Times Square for ZAZ10st Gallery NY (USA), The MCA (Australia), Science Gallery Detroit (USA), The Glucksman Gallery (Ireland), HOTA (Australia), GentleMonster (South Korea), Art Laboratory Berlin (Germany), and many more. See more at www.alintakrauth.com