Why We Do It
As artists and scientists we have both encountered the reactions that come from being overwhelmed by climate change and climate data: distress, shutting down, denial.
We wanted to create an interactive and creative way to help people feel and retain the data. How? By embodying it, playing with it, living with it in a local context. If people can see themselves and the places they care about in the facts and figures, they can combat the helplessness by visualizing a future they want to see.
With Sunk Shore, we create space for an embodied, visceral understanding of climate change data and events. We work on a hyper-local level, to give people a direct connection to the land they inhabit and the more-than-human life that surrounds them. Through these grounded relationships we want to highlight the interdependence of all the forces at play, and empower people to become passionate advocates for their local lands and waters. The ultimate dream is to connect local advocates to each other to build a network of solidarity that can be a force for change.
Our current goal is to make a template that could be used by waterfront communities to create a Sunk Shore engagement; a blueprint to be used along any shoreline, empowering local residents to become stakeholders in the future of their waterways through imaginative problem-solving and speculative invention.
What We Do
Sunk Shore started out as a physical walking tour into the climate changed future that takes place along specific shorelines. The tours combine speculative fiction based in climate modeling, participatory activities, and somatic practice to make complex climate and ecosystem data personal, experiential, and relatable. This combination of embodied data and wild imagination creates a space where participants are empowered to envision taking actions that ameliorate the climate crisis, and create a collective, equitable, and community-based response to our world and each other.
The tours are now complemented by videos, social media performances, zines, creative data-based installations, and large-scale collages that work with the same themes, as well as conference presentations and workshops.
Using several mediums and modes of communicating allows us to bring the process of imaginative futuring to a wide variety of communities, getting under the skin to access an internal experience of the changing climate.Theis combination of embodied data and wild imagination creates a space where participants are empowered to envision taking actions that ameliorate the climate crisis, and create a collective, equitable, and community-based response to our world and each other.
About Us
Clarinda Mac Low started out working in dance and molecular biology and now works in performance and installation, creating participatory events, including Sunk Shore, in collaboration with Carolyn. She is also a professor in design and technology and a former HIV/AIDS researcher and medical journalist, Executive Director of Culture Push, and co-director of Works on Water. From 2022-2024 she was embedded with Genspace, a community biology laboratory, as part of the Artists Employment Program.
clarindamaclow.com
Carolyn Hall (she/her) holds an MS in marine science with a focus on historical marine ecology, is a science communication facilitator, and an award-winning professional dancer. She can often be found along shorelines hatching plans for creative public engagement projects around fish, water, and climate change. She truly believes that making data-rich, complex research more relatable and memorable will improve our future. She co-directs science communication programs for the American Fisheries Society, is a co-founder of Exact Communication, was a Creative Programs Coordinator for Genspace from 2022-2024 as part of the 2-year Artists Employment Program, is on the core team of Works on Water, collaborates with iLAND and Maho Ogawa/Suisoco, and creates the speculative future climate change project 'Sunk Shore' with Clarinda Mac Low.
carolynjhall.com