The Project
This was an other data visualization project of our semester. We had to find a dataset for it, that introduce how invisible technological, social and political changes affect the environment in relation of ecosystems, climate change or AI.
During our research, we found an interesting dataset, about the global acceptance of human responsibility of climate change. We wanted to work with that, because nowadays the spread of misinformation is getting out of control, and it is important to show how it affects the public opinion in a serios and relevant topic like this.
The Database
Our source of data was the research of the Ecological Transformation Barometer in 2024. It is a global survey focusing on degree of acceptability made by Veolia - a french transnational companywith activities in water management, waste management and energy services - and Elabe - an independent research and consulting firm structured around consulting, opinion research and strategic planning.
They did the survey with 29 500 people from 26 countries, which were chosen in their weight in demography and greenhouse gas emissions, and they also ensured a diversity of ecological, political and cultural histories.
The world’s avarage opinion of different questions was calculated by counting each country for 1, so there is no weighting according to the number of inhabitants.
The Result
As the final concept, we used the stairs of the university as the part of our installation. The amount of the black and the white stairs are showing the ratio of the human-responsibility denial and acceptance on the world’s avarage based on the survey.
On the black stairs, there are AI generated tweets denying human-responsibility in the language of the countries with the biggest amount of denial, while the accepting ones are on the white stairs.
As you are looking up from the bottom of the stairs you face the reality of our guilt for climate change. The idea of the concept was heavily inspired by the film, “Don’t look up”, which is a satirical comedy that critiques society’s disinterest to existential threats.
It was also an interesting process to formulate the right promt that makes AI basically generate misinformation. It was an exciting exercise on how to push the boundaries of generative AI.
Ars Electronica Exhibition
In 2025, me and my teammate for this project were honored to be invited to the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz to set up our installation for their Campus Exhibition, and represent ouruniversity. Of course, we accepted our invitation, because it was a huge opportunity for all of us, however we had to redesign our whole concept, since we didn't manage to use the stairs there.
Our new installation is a combination of digital art and traditional printed typography. We visualized the tweets, accepting the human reponsibility for climate change, as a continous text printed on white paperstripes, whose length represents the ratio of the countries' opinion on the database. The denial tweets were projected on the ground, popping up just like in a comment section on a social media platform.
The installation demonstrates, how misinformation and ignorant opinions are "louder", as the projected part of it is so much more conspicuous than the printed one. It was interesting to observe, how the visitors approached it. Some of them stuck at watching the tweets on the ground and haven't even read the paper stripes, which proved that the visual hierarchy of our installation worked well.
