“Experiments in uncertainty and un/knowing: Economics - visual arts perspectives on climate change mitigation”
www.icenslab.org for full details
In June 2025, I delivered a collaborative experimental workshop at the University of Cambridge that explored how art and economics might meet in the shared terrain of radical uncertainty. The event brought together artists, economists, and sustainability researchers to ask how the arts could challenge economists’ models of knowledge—especially in the face of the climate crisis.
We delivered a series of arts-based activities designed to move participants beyond fixed ways of seeing and into processes of generative ambiguity. We leaned into how we can inhabit the unknowable. Across drawing, annotation, collage, and lumen printing, we experimented with how the arts might not only illustrate complexity but provoke it, inviting new forms of sensing, modelling, and decision-making. This was less about translating uncertainty into visual language than about using artistic processes to embrace its volatility.
There needs to be a strong separation between art-making and the way we understand art, uncertainty and the nature of complex systems. Uncertainty is a necessary component for knowledge to arise. However, many science-arts exhibitions tend to be visual representations of still very structured predictable scientific concepts. In order to really think about uncertainty, one needs to lean into the power of art in generating real uncertainty, and not just explaining something in a different visual or artistic way. The logic of art is thus that of being something that leans into the unpredictable.