Republic of Learning (RoL) was an experimental program bringing people together to learn about resilience in times of planetary health crisis, environmental change, and growing uncertainty. Eleven sessions took place between 2019 and 2022, planting seeds for an informal community to emerge with a unique approach to shared learning. RoL combined artistic craft-making with cooperative thinking—slowing down debate to sideline confrontations and argument in favor of more gentle forms of colearning and collaboration. This article explores the methods, outcomes, and opportunities that this process opens up for new forms of action and engagement with issues of climate change, resilience, and reciprocity.

The authors discuss a series of artworks produced since 2009, including The Southern Ocean Studies (2012), The Northern Polar Studies (2014) and Carbon Topographies (2020). Through this work they explore how climate models can be employed to develop data-driven imaginaries of climate change, its impacts and causes. They argue for the experiential potential of this information for producing differently situated ways of knowing climate, framing this through a methodological approach described as “data manifestation.”

Sensory Threads is a pair of interlinked experiences, which explore the way in which sensing can give us insight into how our bodies are a part of their wider environment. Sensory Threads seeks to investigate what happens when wearables move beyond being technologies designed for individuals and are transformed into tools of ‘collective sensing’. It aims to stimulate participants' behaviours through their own emergent and unpredictable actions in an environment, not by pre-defined choices determined in advance by the project's makers or by ‘interesting’ geographic sites. This article describes the design of this artwork, which is currently in prototype form.