THE EARTH REMEMBERS DIFFERENTLY THAN WE DO
2026 – ongoing
Amy Karle, Benjamin Keisling, Jixian Li, Francesca Samsel
The Earth Remembers Differently Than We Do is an immersive climate artwork and live Art Lab translating Greenland ice, AI, deep time, and Earth systems into embodied experience.
How do we learn to look at and feel Earth systems across scale, time, and intelligence?
The Earth Remembers Differently Than We Do is an immersive climate artwork, research environment, and public-facing Art Lab guided by a vital question: how do we learn to look at and feel Earth systems across scale, time, and intelligence? By moving participants from passive observation to active embodied participation, the project bridges the gap between climate awareness and felt understanding. The work centers on a visceral collision between deep geological time and rapid planetary transformation, creating embodied digital-physical realities that translate Greenland ice, bedrock, water, atmosphere, climate data, and deep-time archives into a sensory installation of sound, vibration, temperature, light, mixed reality, and responsive media. These interventions position environmental transformations as a lived, multisensory encounter rather than distant information.
Climate change is often communicated through detached charts, forecasts, and metrics. This project turns climate knowledge into a shared embodied encounter, making interdependence, uncertainty, agency, and consequence perceptible. It invites audiences to feel themselves inside a field of relation rather than outside a distant crisis.
Ecology Art Lab is the collaboration framework through which the project is developed, studying relationships among living, technological, planetary, and perceptual systems through art, science, AI, data, and embodied experience.
The public-facing Art Lab is a live research and creation environment where the process of interdisciplinary inquiry becomes visible. Artists, scientists, engineers, data, AI systems, physical materials, and audiences come together to test how climate knowledge can move from abstraction into felt experience. The Art Lab functions as method, performance, documentation, and public engagement, revealing the conversations, decisions, experiments, failures, tools, and discoveries that shape the final work.
The Artwork is a responsive immersive installation that allows audiences to enter the question physically. Visitors encounter climate and ice-sheet science through spatial sound, vibration, temperature, light, mixed reality, responsive media, and embodied interaction, experiencing ice, bedrock, water, atmosphere, data, and deep time as interconnected forces rather than distant information.
Image on right: Ceramic physicalizations of Greenland’s bedrock with different ice-sheet configurations.  Samsel & Keisling 2025
A visualization of the Greenland ice sheet responding to natural fluctuations in climate during deep time, constrained by samples collected from beneath the ice sheet and dated used geochemical methods. As climate changes, the ice shrinks and regrows, raising global sea levels in the process. Credit: Keisling, Samsel, and Abram 2025.
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VISION
The vision for The Earth Remembers Differently Than We Do is to create an immersive climate artwork where audiences can step into our questions rather than stand outside the answers. Through climate art collaboration, scientific visualization, AI, mixed reality, and embodied experience, the project transforms climate research into a field of awe, agency, interdependence, and consequence, inviting new ways to feel Earth systems and imagine more livable climate futures.Â
As an immersive climate art installation at the intersection of climate futures, immersive media, scientific visualization, and art-science collaboration, the work opens a space for embodied climate data to become felt, shared, and questioned.
A visualization of the internal stratigraphy of the Greenland Ice Sheet. In The Earth Remembers Differently viewers are brought into an immersive visualization space that turns cold, distant climate data into an embodied experience through sight, scent, touch, and feel. Credit: NASA Visualization Studio, 2015.
Textures of ice revealed through fused glass. Visitors are invited to touch physicalizations that sit throughout the exhibit, contributing to the embodied sense of connection with the ice sheet.Â
PROJECT ROADMAP
EXPLORE THE ART LAB
The Art Lab is the live research and creation environment where The Earth Remembers Differently Than We Do takes shape. Artists, climate scientists, AI researchers, engineers, data, physical materials, and sensory systems come together to explore how Earth-system knowledge can move from abstraction into felt experience.
Rather than hiding the process behind the finished artwork, the Art Lab makes interdisciplinary inquiry visible. Conversations, sketches, models, datasets, prototypes, experiments, failures, tools, and discoveries become part of the work itself. Climate science is not only translated into images or information, but tested through materials, bodies, instruments, AI systems, and embodied interaction.
This public-facing process allows audiences to witness how the installation is built, how questions evolve, and how meaning emerges between collaborators, technologies, data, and the living world.
Art Lab as Method Research, experimentation, prototyping, testing, and translation.
Art Lab as Performance The visible process of collaboration, decision-making, discovery, and failure.
Art Lab as Public Engagement  A way for audiences to encounter climate knowledge as something being made, questioned, and felt.
The Art Lab creates climate art collaborations as research interventions, where artistic practice, climate science, AI, data, and embodied experience shape one another in real time.Â
Audiences are invited to step into our questions, encountering climate futures and immersive media as a field
of awe, agency, interdependence, and consequence that can resonate in the body, heart, and mind.
Example of previous work showing augmented reality work on ice cores; in this work, viewers use flashlights on fused glass physicalizations of ice cores, which triggers digital projection of data associated with the cores in real time. Samsel & Keisling 2025.
THE EXPERIENCE
Imagine entering a darkened room: temperature shifts, cold air threaded with a warm breeze, the scent of earthen materials and the atmosphere just before rain. Subtle vibrations move underfoot, as if the ground itself is shifting. Then, a light appears, seeming to respond. Climate is first sensed through the body before it is interpreted through data.
Visitors hear spatial sound, feel vibration and temperature, and see light and generative video moving through the room. Ice, rock, time, and climate begin to emerge as embodied forces. A key moment occurs when participants realize the environment is responsive. Movement, attention, and position influence what unfolds around them.
In the mixed-reality layer through MR glasses available onsite, digital ice, climate records, deep-time archives, geologic histories and possible futures appear over physical space. As more people enter, the experience becomes collective. One person’s way of looking affects what others see and feel.
Most climate data places humanity at a distance, reading the Earth’s vital signs through charts, forecasts, and metrics. The Earth Remembers Differently Than We Do removes that distance: climate and deep-time data become temperature on the skin, sound around the body, light that responds to movement, and a shared terrain shaped by everyone present.
The work invites audiences into a planetary metabolism: a living system of flows, rhythms, feedbacks, and consequences already moving through us. By making that belonging felt, the installation opens a space for awe, agency, and reflection, allowing audiences to step into our questions and remember alongside the Earth through ice, rock, data, and deep time.
Using VR glasses to explore climate data. Samsel, 2019
The work makes interdependence perceptible: that we are not outside the climate system, but inside a living field of relation, consequence, and possibility.
A Multi-Perspective Sensorium
- Traditional climate data often positions people as distant observers. Here, participants stand within the Earth system and feel its forces moving around them.
- A foundation of deep time. The work centers on a shared physical model of Greenland bedrock, a record of geological time that can be circled, approached, and encountered through the body. This foundation connects the experience to Greenland Ice Sheet art, paleoclimate, climate research, and the deep-time record.
- A collective experience: wearing mixed-reality glasses, visitors see digital ice flowing in real time while collectively reshaping the responsive environment. The mixed reality climate artwork makes scientific visualization collective, spatial, and participatory.
- Shared friction. Each person’s viewpoint becomes visible to the rest of the room. Presence, movement, and attention alter the scientific visualization for oneself and for others, revealing how individual choices affect a shared world.
Echoes from the Valley of Existence. Amy Karle, 2024. An immersive, participatory, interactive installation in which audience presence, movement, and attention become part of the artwork, translating participation into an evolving sensory field. It demonstrates the core mechanism of this project: visitors do not simply observe a system, they enter it, alter it, and feel their relationship to others, technology, and the living world.
A Pulse in the Stream. Amy Karle, 2025. A multi-media, participatory, interactive installation. The work shows Karle’s proven ability to create large-scale participatory environments where invisible signals, responsive media, and human presence become embodied experience. It speaks directly to the scale and sensory ambition of this project: turning unseen data into something a room full of people can feel together
SCIENCE, COMPUTER, HUMAN
In The Earth Remembers Differently Than We Do, scientific inquiry, computational systems, and human perception operate within a closed-loop collaborative framework. Climate models and Earth-system datasets often describe processes unfolding across spatial and temporal scales that exceed ordinary human experience, creating a gap between scientific abstraction and lived perception.
To bridge this gap, AI serves as a computational intermediary within the artwork. Machine learning workflows, surrogate models, generative systems, and data pipelines transform Greenland ice-sheet simulations, climate records, and deep-time environmental archives into dynamic visual, spatial, sonic, and tactile experiences. These systems drive changes in light, sound, mixed reality, haptic feedback, temperature, and embodied interaction, enabling complex scientific phenomena to be encountered through sensory experience rather than numerical abstraction alone. This AI climate visualization framework makes AI part of the architecture of the installation: a responsive system that translates climate technology, embodied climate data, and Earth-system research into forms that can be seen, heard, felt, and questioned.
Human perception remains the essential endpoint of this process. The goal is not to replace scientific interpretation with automated outputs, but to create new pathways through which scientific knowledge can be experienced, examined, and questioned. To maintain scientific integrity and mitigate the risks of model error or machine hallucination, the interdisciplinary team incorporates continuous human oversight and rigorous verification procedures throughout development. All data visualizations and sensory representations undergo expert review, ensuring that computational outputs remain grounded in validated climate science while preserving the artwork’s capacity for exploration and reflection.
THE TEAM
Amy Karle
Leads the creative vision, experience design, and the ethical and futuring questions.Independent Artist · Conceptual Art Technologies, LLC
Francesca Samsel
Turns scientific data into physical and visual form, translating between art and science.Texas Advanced Computing Center, UT Austin
Benjamin Keisling
Grounds the work in paleoclimate, ice-sheet systems, and the deep-time record.UT Austin Institute for Geophysics
Jixian Li
Builds the computation that carries climate data across scales to the human senses.Texas Advanced Computing Center, UT Austin
Greg Abram
Brings scientific visualization, mixed-reality systems, and high-performance computing.Texas Advanced Computing Center, UT Austin
A wider ecosystem
The project also draws on a wider ecosystem of fabrication, scientific, technical, and public-program collaborators, confirmed as the work develops.
This project is in development. We welcome conversations with museums, climate and technology funders, research institutions, public-engagement partners, immersive media venues, and collaborators interested in supporting prototype development, exhibition, documentation, and public programming.
