Data at Risk Series: Amy Balkin

Making Climate Data Public

Existing environmental data–from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports to emission market data – are being reshaped by artists to engage with a variety of publics and audiences. These materials are often available yet 'invisible' - opaque, bureaucratic, stultifying, upsetting, or otherwise challenging. San Francisco-based artist Amy Balkin will discuss how she has leveraged existing environmental and climate change data into public, experimental, participatory, collaborative, sited, and performative artworks, addressing political participation and exclusion in the context of climate change, and in support of environmental justice. These 'arts-driven research' projects include an environmental justice audio tour of California's I-5 freeway, a 'clean air' public park, a map of human influence on the atmosphere, and a participatory climate change archive made up of contributions from people living in places that may–or already are–disappearing owing to sea level rise and other climate change impacts.

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Amy Balkin is an artist whose works address property relations, environmental justice, and equity in the context of climate change. Her projects and collaborations include A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting (Balkin, et al.), atmospheric "clean air" park Public Smog, environmental justice audio tour Invisible-5 (Balkin/Stringfellow/Halbur, Greenaction and POND), and The Atmosphere, A Guide. Her work has been exhibited in Sublime (Centre Pompidou Metz), Hybris (MUSAC), Rights of Nature (Nottingham Contemporary), and dOCUMENTA (13), and published in Decolonizing Nature (Sternberg), Materiality (Whitechapel/MIT), and Critical Landscapes (UC Press). She lives in San Francisco, where she is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Lunch will be provided to those attending the talk. 

When data are at risk, public life suffers. Data at Risk is a four-part lecture series addressing the effect of precarious environmental data on efforts to save the environment. Focusing on how journalists, academics and artists use storytelling and visual tools to foster better awareness of the environment, Data at Risk is co-sponsored by the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication and DataRefuge of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the School of Arts and Sciences.