Abstract
This publication gives an overview of the structure of a STAC funded collaborative project between Shona Kitchen + Georgia Rhodes, RISD and Dr Mingxi Zhuo and his team from URI. It presents student work which grew out of Techlands Research Studio, Digital + Media, Rhode Island School of Design. Fall 2021, Led by Shona Kitchen + Georgia Rhodes.
For Kitchen and Rhodes, RI-BSCO was embedded within Techlands Research stu-dio Fall 20221, an interdisciplinary graduate open elective in the program of Digital + Media at Rhode Island School of Design.
Utilizing a broad range of media, students developed proposals offering alterna-tive systems, visualizations, experiences, that explore new, publicly engaging experi-ences around the subject of the Narragan-sett Bay and the effect of climate change; events which are catastrophically impacting our coastal communities and act as media-tors between hard science and the public.
Kitchen and Rhodes invited the students to explore through their own artistic research process:
* How can novel approaches such as new visual products, tools, and languages for visualizing complex information be developed in collaboration with artists, designers, engineers and scientists and promote broader engagement in and understanding of the scientific pro-cess?
* How do sampling processes to collect modeling data relate to artistic inquiry?
* Using data and imagery, as well as study-ing the technological process of dis-covery specific to this project, con-sider new experimental tools to visually describe the critical nature of this work as it relates to the public’s inter-ests in Narragansett Bay ecology and the possibility of hazardous events in the estuary.
Through presentations and site visits witnessing water deployment, RISD students were offered a deep understanding of the Narragansett Bay and URI’s zones of study; understanding of the tools and techniques deployed by URI and the evidence col-lected by such tools to reveal the bay’s ecosystem; physical, biogeochemical, eco-logical. The end of the Fall semester culminated in a public exhibition, entitled Evidence at the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab, RISD, during which an open session took place bringing together the students, their work in conversation with Dr Mingxi Zhuo and Dr Patri-cia Thibodeau.
This collaborative research project was organized around three actions: marine robot deployment, robot-model interaction, and data visualization. It fostered an interdisciplinary team of engineers, scientists and artists from two Rhode Island institutes. The synergic effort was not limited in bringing new technology and advancing the science in coastal ecosystem modeling and observation, but also intended to engage the public and stakeholders. The collaborative research team also provide concrete evidence and valuable experience to support the future development of the Robot-Integrated Bay-scale Ecosystem Observatory (RI-BSCO) with other external funds.