Immersive Climate Imaginaries: Towards Multisensory Ecological Knowledge lecture by Rasa Smite will take place as part of the Interfacing Ecologies Lecture Series at ZHdK, Zurich on Tuesday, November 25, 2025 at 17:00.

How can data become experience? And how might artistic interpretation turn scientific data into embodied ecological knowledge?
This talk traces Rasa Smite’s 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, she moves 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, she argues 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.

The Interfacing Ecologies lecture series explores how interactions take place in more-than-human worlds and how we can access these interactions in the field.
With guests from various disciplines and fields, we ask how we can formulate and put into practice new understandings of interactions in environments and ecologies, and how we might deal with these challenges that are so close to life.

Curation: Karmen Franinovic, Duy Bui, Roman Kirschner, Rasa Weber

Rasa Smite is an artist and researcher working at the intersections of art, science, and immersive technologies. She holds a PhD, she is Professor at Riga Technical University’s Liepaja Academy, and Principal Investigator of the SNSF-funded project Immersion Studies of Climate Experience (2025–2028) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She is also co-founder of the RIXC Center for New Media Culture (Riga). Together with Raitis Smits, she creates visionary techno-ecological and immersive artworks such as Pond Battery, Swamp Radio, Atmospheric Forest, and Solarceptors, exploring the relations between nature, technology, and perception. Her works have been exhibited internationally at Ars Electronica, ZKM, HeK, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, and have received awards including the Prix Ars Electronica and the Falling Walls Art & Science Award.

More:
https://interactiondesign.zhdk.ch/events/interfacing-ecologies/