What to do with the gigantic scientific data archives?
– Play with them.

Adnan Softić and Nina Softić with Thies Mynther
moderated by Tirdad Zolghadr

The work of artist duo Adnan Softić and Nina Softić addresses the pressing challenge of communicating scientific facts within a context of climate change. It questions the nature of doubt in the natural sciences and addresses the lack of a cultural approach to the earth as a holistic entity.

Their project klimaton ARCTIC≈2020 is based on a seminal event in scientific research: late 2020, the research expedition MOSAIC returned from the Arctic, where it had been collecting data for over a year. It remains the largest example of data collection within a single region, and one of the last comprehensive inventories of a disappearing landscape, one that is, according the scientific community, a “key witness to climate change”.

Large data archives are by no means a solution to the problem as long as their contents are not given a socially accepted meaning. Should such efforts be left to science alone? Or does a transfer of those digital archives into collective memory need to take place via detours that do not rely exclusively on reason and predefined scientific rules?

Together with a group of MOSAiC scientists, composer Thies Mynther and a technical team including Juan Duarte, Chris von Rautenkranz, Martin Edelmann and Jan Münther, the artist duo Adnan and Nina Softić developed a sound instrument that emits data from the Arctic as sound – creating a large-scale sonic portrait of a disappearing landscape. The instrument is a hybrid between a sonification device and a musical instrument – allowing an open approach to the data.

When? Where?
12 June 2023, 7pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin

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