The Waterviz: The Confluence of Art, Music and Science at Long Term Ecological Research Sites.

Human societies in the 21^st century are faced with increasingly complex ecological and socio-ecological challenges.  The current paradigm recognizes the need to bridge the physical, social, and political sciences to tackle these difficult problems, but often marginalizes the role of the Arts and Humanities. However, there is a growing recognition that a new paradigm is needed, one in which authentic relationships between the Arts (writ large) and the Sciences are revitalized to bring together the combined expertise of diverse disciplines to create a more unified approach to solving the inter-related ecological and social issues of the 21^st century.

This collaboration between artists and scientists addresses this need for a new paradigm of engagement between the Arts and Sciences.  The program is using insights from multiple disciplines to encode high volume and frequency ecological data in new ways in order to better discover underlying pattern and process. Specifically, online digital visualization and sonification tools are deployed to display multi-dimensional real-time ecological data generated from environmental sensor arrays deployed at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, NH. In a novel partnership with neuroscientists, the project will also explore how the stimulation of different neural circuitry in the human brain (visual and auditory attention and reasoning centers) may allow large and rapidly expanding datasets to be understood in different ways that lead to new discoveries about ecological processes. This project is intended as a case study to demonstrate how the full intellectual integration of Arts and Sciences can help to provide a deeper level of understanding about the environments we live and work in.