This feature delves into the intersection of fine arts and environmental exhibits, showcasing how creativity can inspire and inform during challenging times.
Imagine a digital time-lapse, meticulously crafted by the London-based artist studio ScanLAB, capturing the slow, agonizing collapse of a majestic saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert. Its parched branches crumble to the ground, a poignant symbol. These iconic cactuses, known for their resilience and longevity (often living over 150 years), traditionally thrive by storing water during rainy seasons to endure intensely hot, dry summers. Yet, even these symbols of endurance are faltering.
Spanning over 100,000 square miles across Arizona, California, and northwestern Mexico, the Sonoran Desert boasts a rich diversity of plants exquisitely adapted to its harsh conditions. However, a relentless increase in temperatures and prolonged droughts are now pushing these steadfast species to their breaking point.
“In recent years, the Sonoran Desert has been the driest and hottest we’ve seen, and it is expected to get worse,” warns Raul Puente-Martinez, a research botanist and curator of living collections at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. He emphasizes the critical need to re-evaluate plant care strategies as the climate changes, sharing a universal message: “When I speak with other botanical gardens, I say that maybe you haven’t seen it yet in your communities, but it’s just a matter of time.”
Recognizing this urgency, the Desert Botanical Garden partnered with ScanLAB a few years ago. Their mission: to create a digital installation illustrating the profound impact of climate change on plants, including the now-vulnerable saguaro. ScanLAB is part of a growing movement of artist-led groups harnessing scientific data to illuminate the climate crisis, giving tangible form to often overwhelming subjects. Their aim isn’t to instill fear, but to foster understanding through factual, accessible visualizations.
Through innovative techniques like three-dimensional scanning and close collaboration with local photographers and scientists, ScanLAB produced stunning time-lapse artworks. These pieces documented various locations across the garden and the vast Sonoran Desert, including blooming cacti meticulously scanned within their London studio. Some sites were revisited for a full year to capture nuanced changes. The team also incorporated visuals of human impact, such as housing developments encroaching on the garden and stressing water resources, to highlight the multifaceted origins of environmental degradation.
The resulting digital artworks, unveiled this fall in “Framerate: Desert Pulse,” eloquently convey both the inherent fragility and the enduring beauty and resilience of local flora. Viewers witness plants growing, vibrant blooms opening and closing, in a dance of life and struggle. “It gives you a sense of time outside your perception,” explains William Trossell, co-founder of ScanLAB. “There’s a lovely dance that occurs. Cacti are breathing, moving and are responsive to the environment.”
While “Framerate” offers an intimate look at a future already unfolding, other artists delve into more extreme scenarios. Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s “Boreal Dreams” (2025), which premiered earlier this year at “Northern Lights” in the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, Switzerland, presents a stark vision. This digital installation, accessible via an interactive website, simulates the boreal forest across five temperature stages. It begins at ambient temperatures and escalates to a chilling nine degrees Celsius, where the forest is rendered “only a memory.” Built upon data from the Marcell Experimental Forest – a Minnesota research center dedicated to studying global warming’s effects – Steensen’s work paints desolate pictures of what lies ahead.
Visitors to the Beyeler experienced the forest cycling through climate zones on an outdoor screen. Online users, however, engage in a more profound interaction, navigating the simulated landscape at each temperature. They encounter grim details of ecological collapse: melting permafrost, evaporating water, and disappearing species. This immersive experience, augmented by a haunting soundtrack meant to evoke dreams of the boreal forest, cultivates a deep, visceral awareness of climate change.
Further afield, at the MIT Museum near Boston, fiber artist Janet Echelman employs a more abstract lens to climate change with her sculptural installation, “Remembering the Future” (2025). This braided fiber artwork, resembling a three-dimensional web, gracefully hangs above the stairs in the museum’s lobby, visible to all who pass by. Guided by MIT’s Raffaele Ferrari, a professor of oceanography and co-director of the institute’s Lorenz Center for climate research, Echelman utilized climate data spanning from the last ice age to the present, alongside projections of future environments, to inform her intricate geometric design.
“I am acutely aware of, and overwhelmed by, news about the climate,” Echelman shared in an interview. “It feels like data is coming at me and I don’t have the tools to make meaning of it.”
To transform this sentiment into a tangible visual, Echelman collaborated with Caitlin Mueller, an MIT associate professor of building technology. Mueller’s lab developed a specialized tool to model the complex, net-like structure of Echelman’s knotted and intertwined fibers, mirroring the intricacy of the data itself.
Complementing the sculpture, Mueller also created an interactive digital tool, available through a kiosk and website. This allows audiences to explore the engineering behind the design, offering a behind-the-scenes look at their creative process. “It’s a high-fidelity digital twin of the sculpture generated through our computational simulation that you can orbit and pan through to get perspectives that you can’t see physically in the space,” Mueller explained.
For Echelman, empowering viewers to interact with the design is central to its purpose. “You’re not just looking at the work, you’re being brought in, because you are a designer, too,” she asserted. “We are all designing the future through our actions.”
At the Whitney Museum, the animation “The River is a Circle” (2025) by Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz, displayed on the fifth-floor terrace, expands on this powerful message by presenting the past, present, and future as interconnected and coexisting.
This sophisticated software-driven artwork visually divides the Hudson River horizontally, showcasing activity both above and below its surface. It dynamically illustrates tide levels, sunrise, and sunset—calculated in real-time using existing data—alongside live marine traffic and weather information sourced from external applications.
The visuals are a rich tapestry of symbolism, featuring elements like Atlantic sturgeon swimming alongside objects resembling doughnuts, representing police boats. Other elements appear as islands adorned with iconography reflecting New York’s history, from Lenape settlements to contemporary symbols, all presented together without adhering to a linear timeline.
The artists also incorporate contrasting future possibilities: “One terrible one, if everything is business as usual, and one not so bad future,” Zurkow elaborated. In the dire scenario, islands populated by gated and surveilled communities drift on the water. Conversely, in the less bleak future, these islands carry hopeful symbols like solar panels, emblematic of renewable energy solutions.
Zurkow clarified the nuanced hope embedded in their work: “There was never going to be a positive future in the work, that’s no longer possible. But things don’t have to be terrible if we don’t let them. We are part of climate systems, not passive subjects.”