Climart - Visual Art as a Tool to Trigger Behavioural Change in the Public - Exploring the Psychological Mechanisms Behind, 2018

The Climart Project addressed an important research gap in the domain of communication of climate change, namely which effects do climate change related art projects have on their audience, what are the psychological mechanisms behind these effects and how can climate art be an alternative communication approach to activate the general public to engage in and support climate change mitigation measures. Numerous climate art projects have been implemented around the world but very little is known about if they are effective, to which kind of audience they reach out to and what kind of processes they trigger in their audience. The project built on results from a pre-project that suggested that visual climate art can trigger moments of reflection, has the potential to reach to groups of the society that usually are less open to climate change communications, but needed to be carefully designed to avoid triggering responsibility denial. In doing the analyses, the project drew on input from psychology, arts, communication and environmental science.

The data consists of three datasets from two studies conducted in the Climart Project. Study one was conducted in November/December 2015 at the ARTCOP event which was a climate art festival in parallel to the climate sumit in Paris. A paper-pencil survey was carried out among 37 of the audience of these artworks with a paper-pencil survey. The dataset from this study comes in two parts: 1) A dataset from the individual audience responses, and 2) A dataset with 1-2 "expert ratings" of characteristics of the artwork itself, conducted by the researchers. The second dataset is an audience survey conducted at the Trondheim and London shows with the artwork "pollution pods" created by the commissioned project artist Michael Pinsky. The data was conducted with the audience and a shorter with a comparable control group not exposed to the artwork.