FIELD TRIP: The Museum as Field Station
The Exploratorium Center for Art & Inquiry is working with the Bay Observatory environmental monitoring program on a project called Museum as Field Station. The project aims to bring the public a better understanding of the scientific processes related to climate change research by creating a lively public platform for exchange between artists, scientists, educators, and the public.
This workshop will engage current artist-in-residence Rosten Woo, who is working with our current atmospheric air-quality data to develop new ways of conveying and communicating the carbon cycle as a complex systemic process, the key to comprehending the dramatic shifts in global temperature. Ron Cohen, an atmospheric chemist at University California, Berkeley, who designed the Beacon Network, a network of carbon sensors located on the rooftops of East Bay high schools, is participating in the Exploratorium environmental monitoring program. Woo is exploring Cohen’s carbon network and current climate-change high school curriculum as a potential context for his work.
This workshop will explore art-informed science curriculum experiments designed to investigate approaches to understanding the carbon cycle and its implications toward action in the politics of climate change.
Director, Center for Art and Inquiry
Exploratorium
Marina McDougall is a curator with over 20 years of experience developing interdisciplinary arts projects. She is currently the director of the Exploratorium’s Center for Art & Inquiry (CAI), an R&D center for the arts within the larger learning laboratory of the Exploratorium. CAI oversees the museum’s long-running artist-in-residence program and new Over the Water program and initiates special projects to advance work at the intersection of art and interdisciplinary learning. McDougall has recently worked with artists including Fujiko Nakaya, Jeppe Hein, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, and many others. She is an adjunct professor in CCA’s Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice and serves on the board of the Seed Fund.
Director, Bay Observatory
Exploratorium
Susan Schwartzenberg is a visual artist and curator whose work explores the aesthetics of learning in public contexts. She has developed numerous public projects and is currently the director of the Bay Observatory, an experimental gallery exploring ways to engage environmental understanding at the Exploratorium, located on Piers 15 and 17 on the urban edge of the San Francisco Bay.
