Intimate Atmospheres
What happens when science speaks through art?
The Intimate Atmospheres digital art meets science communication exhibition will take place in Langes Gate 1-3 from the 20th of October until the 24th of October.
Intimate Atmospheres invites audiences into the subtle and often invisible world of microclimates—the localised environmental conditions that shape biodiversity and forest health across Nordic ecosystems. Drawing on scientific research from the "Understanding the role and interplay of forest microclimates for successfully balancing productivity and biodiversity among Nordic forest landscapes" project through Nordic Forest Research (SNS), these artworks transform quantitative climate data into sensory, aesthetic, and participatory experiences. Through sound, image, interactivity, and speculative media, the exhibition reinterprets scientific findings not as static facts, but as dynamic, affective encounters that encourage reflection on how we perceive and inhabit forest ecologies.
This exhibition is a culmination of collaborations between the CDN's AiR node, invited digital artists, and scientists from The Norwegian Institute of Nature Research. The work has been funded by Nordic Forest Research. By translating microclimate data into visual and sonic languages, the participating artists foreground the capacity of creative practice to bridge disciplinary divides. The works challenge audiences to engage not only intellectually but sensorially with data, inviting visitors to listen, look, and move through the rhythms of a forest location. Through speculative design and generative systems the exhibition extends scientific research into the domain of imagination, opening space for dialogue about environmental futures and the evolving relationship between human and nonhuman worlds.
Intimate Atmospheres reframes the act of data collection as a poetic and philosophical gesture, an invitation to witness otherwise unseen microclimactic shifts, where data can become material: it vibrates, hums, shimmers. The exhibition asks: what happens when science speaks through art?
