The Journey of Water

Water moves everywhere — in our bodies, the air we breathe, and covering seventy percent of Earth’s surface. Yet some of humanity’s greatest challenges emerge from our inability to see, feel, and understand how water moves. Over Earth’s history, natural cycles lock water in ice sheets and aquifers for millions of years, or release it to reshape coastlines. Today, humans are accelerating these movements in ways unprecedented in geologic time, with significant consequences for Texas coastlines and communities.

The Journey of Water is an exhibit underdevelopment that connects UT-based polar science with Texas-focused impacts through an art-science collaboration that leverages AI to move between physical and digital worlds. We seek to develop a proof of concept for immersive, embodied climate communication and pursue two linked research questions: (1) How does a multi-modal art-science encounter — combining haptic engagement with scientific artifacts, full-scale data visualization, and AI-mediated dialogue — shift participants’ factual understanding of sea-level change, emotional engagement with coastal climate risk, and intended adaptive behavior, relative to conventional communication formats? (2) What features of cross-disciplinary art-science-AI collaboration enable or constrain replicable methodologies for public climate communication?

A recent morning during fieldwork in Greenland, while PI Keisling was flying a drone, a piece of glacier large enough to bury the UT campus under two hundred meters of solid ice calved into the sea. In aggregate, such events accelerate sea-level change along the Texas Gulf Coast, threatening communities protected by the fifty-billion-dollar Ike Dike currently under construction. These connections are well-documented, but difficult to feel. The Journey of Water creates a new entry point into climate understanding through immersive art-science experiences.

The challenge of climate change is not only one of scientific understanding and prediction, but of how findings are presented in ways people can trust, absorb, and act on. For example, mechanisms driving sea-level rise are increasingly well understood. Yet the scale and abstraction of these processes often exceed the human capacity to process and respond. The Journey of Water creates a new entry point into climate understanding through immersive art-science experiences that translate the scientific processes behind climate knowledge into the language of story, metaphor, beauty, and lived human experience.

The scientific narrative connects Greenland’s ice sheet to water on the Texas coast. One morning during recent fieldwork, while PI Keisling was flying a drone to collect velocity data, a piece of ice large enough to bury the UT campus under two hundred meters of solid ice calved from the glacier into the sea. In aggregate, such events are accelerating sea-level change along the Texas Gulf Coast — threatening communities protected by the fifty-billion-dollar Ike Dike and accelerating coastal change. Simultaneously, cities like Corpus Christi are literally running out of fresh water after much of it has been extracted by corporations in the process of oil and gas production. Although our society is dependent on these commodities, their consumption further exacerbates glacier melt, creating a vicious but largely invisible loop. These connections are real and well-documented, but difficult to feel. This project aims to close that gap.

The installation guides viewers through three scientific sites along Greenland’s ice sheet — from its thinning coastal margins to its two-mile-thick interior summit — each revealing how recently the ice was smaller than today and what that implies for seas in the near and distant future. Keisling’s archive of sediment cores, drone imagery, bathymetric surveys, and ice-sheet model simulations forms the scientific foundation. Samsel translates this material into immersive projected environments — ice, terrain, and modeled processes rendered at full scale using the TACC Visualization Laboratory’s 24-monitor, 8K display infrastructure, a resource unique to UT Austin.

Physical artifacts — ceramic and fused-glass interpretations of sediment and ice cores fabricated by Samsel serve as touchable representations of scientific records collected in the field. Embedded sensors allow these objects to trigger projections, animations, and data visualizations when handled, enabling viewers to move fluidly between scientific measurement and material interpretation, engaging both analytical and emotional modes of understanding.

The Collabortion

Our collaboration between a polar geologist, a scientific artist, and an AI and visualization researcher centers on three complementary and mutually dependent modes of inquiry: the science of climate and sea-level change; artistic and narrative interpretation of that science; and the development of interactive technologies that provide audiences with pathways toward agency and action.

Dr. Benjamin Keisling contributes expertise in glaciology, sediment core analysis, and paleoclimate reconstruction, grounding the project in rigorous science connecting polar ice-sheet dynamics with historical and projected sea-level change along the Texas coast. Francesca Samsel brings extensive experience in the artistic translation and contextualization of scientific data, developing methods through which beauty, metaphor, and embodied experience open new pathways into climate understanding. Jixian Li contributes expertise in immersive systems, AI-assisted interaction, and visualization technologies that allow audiences to actively explore scientific content and locally relevant adaptation and mitigation strategies. We partner with artist Amy Karle, who has worked on large-scale installations at the intersection of human health, environment and artificial intelligence, to evaluate the impact of the work and intentionally bring it to scale by applying for external funding. 

Our collaboration operates through collective iterative development rather than sequential or disciplinary handoffs. Scientific questions shape artistic exploration; artistic interpretation reshapes how scientific stories are framed and communicated; interactive systems design reshapes what questions the science and art must answer. Through this recursive process, the team builds experiences that are simultaneously scientifically accurate, emotionally resonant, and publicly accessible. The research questions at the heart of this project—about how immersive, aesthetic encounters with climate science shift public orientation and behavior—require all three lenses simultaneously and are not accessible from within any single discipline.

`