Interfacing Ecologies || Rasa Smite || 25 November 2025 || 17.00 – 18.30 || Cinema 3.G02
Immersive Climate Imaginaries: Towards Multisensory Ecological Knowledge
Rasa Smite
Tuesday 25 November 2025
17.00 – 18.30
Cinema 3.G02
Host: Karmen Franinovic
How can data become experience? And how might artistic interpretation turn scientific data into embodied ecological knowledge?
This talk traces my research and artistic experiments with data — from early works in sonification, such as Pond Battery(2014) and Swamp Radio (2018), which translated bacterial electricity fluctuations into sound, to more recent explorations of data visualization in immersive and extended-reality environments. These include Atmospheric Forest (2020), which visualizes how forest emissions, affected by climate change, interact with atmospheric processes, and Solarceptors(2025), which explores plant sensing in relation to light as an intelligent process. In these works, digitally scanned natural sites are overlaid with visualized and sonified data patterns of temperature, emissions, humidity, and light. Through the aesthetic interpretation of scientific data, invisible ecosystem processes are transformed into immersive, emotion-evoking experiences.
Extending this approach, I move toward immersive climate imaginaries as a way to explore the entanglement of scientific and artistic knowing. As Paul N. Edwards reminds us, “everything we know about the world’s climate — past, present, and future — we know through models,” a statement that speaks to scientific knowing. In contrast, Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges — rooted in the body, place, and relation — invite forms of artistic knowing, where climate data might also become multisensorial and embodied.
Drawing further on Don Ihde’s concept of multisensory science and Yusoff and Gabrys’s notion of climate imaginaries, I argue that the artistic “sensorialization” of climate data in immersive extended-reality environments can expand scientific knowing — creating new modes of sensing, perceiving, and connecting with the changing planet.
Rasa Smite
Rasa Smite is an artist and researcher working at the intersections of art, science, and immersive technologies. She is co-founder of the Riga-based RIXC Center for New Media Culture (since 2000), co-curator of its festivals, and chief editor of the Acoustic Space publication series.
She holds a PhD from Riga Stradins University. Currently, she is Principal Investigator of the SNSF-funded project Immersion Studies of Climate Experience (2025–2028) at the Immersive Art Space, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Previously, she was a researcher in the SNSF projects Ecodata and Plants_Intelligence at HGK FHNW Basel, a lecturer in Art, Culture Technology Program in MIT, Boston, and a guest professor at HfG Karlsruhe.
In her artistic practice, together with Raitis Smits, she has created visionary artworks — from early sonic explorations with Xchange Internet Radio Network and Acoustic Space Lab (1998–2001) to techno-ecological works such as Pond Battery and Swamp Radio (2014–2019), and more recent immersive experiences including Atmospheric Forest, Deep Sensing, and Solarceptors (2020–2025). Her works have been exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), HeK (Basel), ZKM (Karlsruhe), MEET (Milan), and other venues across North America, Europe, and Asia, and have received awards including the Prix Ars Electronica (1998) and the Falling Walls Art & Science Award (2021).
