Hug@ree is an interactive installation that provides a bond between urban beings and the forest. It is an ARTiVIS (Arts, Real-Time Video and Interactivity for Sustainability) experience that provides interaction with trees and videos of trees in real-time, raising awareness of the natural environment and how individual action can collectively become so relevant. In this paper, the authors present an overview of the Hug@ree concept, related work, implementation, user experience evaluation and future work.

The art ! ⋈ climate contest used art as a catalyst in helping to build bridges between sound artists and specific humanitarian actions related to climate change, with the intent of engendering a deeper awareness and creating lasting working partnerships in addressing our global environmental crisis. Both the process and the outcomes of this initiative highlight the value of integrating creative approaches into humanitarian work for complex risk management issues.

Balance-Unbalance aims to use art as a catalyst to explore intersections between nature, science, technology and society with the intent of engendering a deeper awareness and creating lasting intellectual working partnerships in solving our global environmental crisis.

While the notion of autarky is often contested in terms of feasibility and desirability, art and design projects that deal with autarky seem moreover to suggest positive socio-cultural and ecological effects of autarkic living. A social network model of autarky is introduced to unify these seemingly opposing views.

Interactive artistic installations represent avant-garde forms of Contemporary Art. They are artistic works able to change their behavior in response to the behavior of the viewers, turning them into (more or less) active participants. This paper discusses an interactive installation the authors developed during the beginning of 2012 for the St. Elmo Castle in Naples, Italy. In this installation the audience determines the evolution of the life cycle of specific plants, in terms of an opening/closing process. The paper proposes some reflections on this case study, especially about the engagement dimension promoted by the work.

The investigation of the role of Art as a Catalyst at the intersection of science and technology has become a global focal point over the last decade. The Balance-Unbalance 2013 international conference explored this issue in depth. “Artists as Catalysts” was the main topic of the 2013 Ars Electronica Festival - strong evidence of significant interdisciplinary progress. Nevertheless the question remains: How is art, science and technology changing in the process? Does cross-disciplinary artist-initiated collaboration function as a catalyst in this setting? This paper briefly examines these issues based on personal participatory experience.

The hosting of the Balance-Unbalance 2013 International Conference in a UNESCO designated Biosphere Reserve was seen as a strategic opportunity to align the objectives and activities of Biosphere Reserves to the aspirations of Balance-Unbalance.

Biosphere Soundscapes (BioScapes) is a large-scale interdisciplinary art project underpinned by the creative possibilities of soundscape ecology, a rapidly evolving field of biology used to record environmental patterns and changes. This project is designed to inspire communities across the world to listen to the environment and re-imagine the potential of International UNESCO Biosphere Reserves as learning laboratories for a sustainable future.

This paper will examine what has been learned through three years of research by an interdisciplinary university laboratory investigating ethical design and media. The University of New Mexico’s Social Media Workgroup (SMW) is an environment in which faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and outside experts work in interdisciplinary collaborative teams to design and develop a wide variety of media tools, assets and events including the large-scale projection work Particle Falls visualizing real-time air quality in San Jose, California, and a permanent public work at the University of Utah, E-Oculus .

This paper presents research investigating how creative practice can complement scientific discourses in engaging the public with environmental issues. Focusing on the Floating Land environmental art festival and The People’s Garden eco-visualization, this enquiry examines how participatory creative projects can engender social learning and reflection on environmental values that operate as catalysts for change.

In a world of changing climate risks, the humanitarian sector is facing an unprecedented future of changing hazard profiles and increasingly complex decision-making scenarios. Individuals, communities and disaster managers need to re-examine their way of analyzing information and learn how to make decisions founded on uncertainty rather than historical trends. As a result of this increasingly dynamic future, the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre decided to re-examine its own strategies for communicating complex climate risk management concepts by engaging with the arts through the use of games and participatory video.

Birding the Future is a multi-layered interdisciplinary project that explores issues of species loss and biodiversity while specifically focusing on the warning abilities of birds as indicators of environmental health. It is an outdoor installation and image walk incorporating multi-channel sound, stereoscopic images, text, Morse code messages, calls of endangered and extinct bird species and a rendering of projected extinction rate. Birding the Future is a global project designed as a series of local, site-specific works.

The fusion of visual art and climate science to produce something new to mediate the urgency of the climate change issue is explored in relation to Simon O’Sullivan’s conception of contemporary art invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics and futures orientation. The question considered is: Can and does climate change art crystallize a different subjectivity within viewers? Conclusions are that the visual art considered in this article does have the prospect of connecting viewers with some realization of future climate change implications.

The psycho-historical theory of art posits that the functions of an artwork are effects of that artwork selected and reproduced because they fulfill humans’ mental and social needs. To develop this account, I hypothesize a cluster of core functions of environmental art, which encompasses effects such as tracking, broadcasting, emotions manipulation, cooperation, and critical reflection.

Conventionally, indigenous knowledge such as that held by Māori (the indigenous culture of Aotearoa New Zealand) is seen as in total contrast to Western scientific knowledge. In this paper the author puts forward instances where ideology is held in common across cultural borders. A general awareness of facets of shared ideology has been refined, extended and given substance through three curatorial projects involving Dr. Te Huirangi Waikerepuru, a highly respected kaumatua (elder). These took place in Istanbul, Albuquerque and Aotearoa New Zealand. Ethically, acceptance of these commonalities leads to considering the shifting boundary of knowledge in contemporary life.