Dynamics and roles in art and climate science collaborations: experiences from the University of Hamburg

Pagnone, Anna; Behrens, Jörn; Nielsen, David Marcolino; Jetter, Linda; Vayreda Calbó, Lluc; Burton-Weiss, Sam; Coesebrink, Dit; Grillo, Daniele Alef; Kemper, Carl Maria; Petzet, Nana; Schurr, Jenni

doi:10.5194/egusphere-2025-5213

Preprints

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-5213

Preprints

30 Oct 2025

| 30 Oct 2025

Dynamics and roles in art and climate science collaborations: experiences from the University of Hamburg

Anna Pagnone, Jörn Behrens, David Marcolino Nielsen, Linda Jetter, Lluc Vayreda Calbó, Sam Burton-Weiss, Dit Coesebrink, Daniele Alef Grillo, Carl Maria Kemper, Nana Petzet, and Jenni Schurr

Abstract. Art and science collaborations enable new means for science communication, knowledge production, and activism. Previous work has often focused on the outcome of such endeavors and on an external description of these collaborations, and less on the personal dynamics in the collaboration itself. Our study of art and science collaborations in the project "Portraits of Climate" at the University of Hamburg takes a closer look at internal dynamics and roles and shows that the value or success of a collaboration does not depend on whether it is a one-way or a two-way collaboration, or whether the roles are classically separated in artist and scientist or are mixed. Instead, the decisive factors lie in mutual understanding, acceptance of team dynamics, and the subjective perceptions of participants – shaped by their motivations, backgrounds, and relationships with the partners – which often differs from an objective external description of the process observed. The project highlighted the importance of safe spaces, trust, and openness, while also revealing the fragility of these conditions without active facilitation and support. Although constrained to a small group of participants and visitors, the project demonstrated the potential of art and science collaborations to stimulate intellectual growth, to overcome one's predefined role, and to open a gateway for critical reflection, thereby catalyzing new approaches to addressing the environmental challenges of our time.

Received: 21 Oct 2025 – Discussion started: 30 Oct 2025

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Anna Pagnone, Jörn Behrens, David Marcolino Nielsen, Linda Jetter, Lluc Vayreda Calbó, Sam Burton-Weiss, Dit Coesebrink, Daniele Alef Grillo, Carl Maria Kemper, Nana Petzet, and Jenni Schurr

Status: final response (author comments only)

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2025-5213', Todd Siler, 09 Dec 2025

The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2025/egusphere-2025-5213/egusphere-2025-5213-RC1-supplement.pdf

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-5213-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Anna Pagnone, 22 Dec 2025
  
  We would like to sincerely thank Todd Siler for your constructive and encouraging comments, and especially for highlighting the importance of ArtScience collaborations in climate and environmental research.
  We greatly appreciate the extensive list of references provided; we will carefully consider and incorporate a selection of these into our manuscript.
  Your added factors contributing to a “successful collaboration” have been particularly enlightening. We recognize the need for clearer definitions, especially given the diversity of „related yet distinct, terms—Art & Science, art-science, Art/Science, Science/Art, SciArt, and ArtScience". However, we remain cautious about over-formalizing something that is inherently fluid and deep.
  Your comments have also inspired us to reflect on how to better support and structure such collaborations.
  As a side note, we would like to emphasize that, in some of our case studies, the expectations associated with experience in art and science collaborations sometimes hindered the collaborative process. Conversely, some newcomers, without expectations, approached the collaboration with fresh perspectives, leading to stronger bounds.
  Once again, we are deeply grateful for your thoughtful support and comments, which will significantly enriched our work.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-5213-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2025-5213', Saul E. Halfon, 14 May 2026

The paper by Pagnone et al describes a Science and Art (SciArt) project in which a scientist and artist are paired to create a visual arts piece on some aspect of climate change. The goal of the project is to create five such pairs, have them work in an open process, and then interview them to collect reflections on the process they developed. The paper then maps these outcomes and draws conclusions about the different paths these collaborative pairs took, as well as what each found valuable or not valuable about the process. The bottom line is that the collaborators took very different routes, generally found the process to be personally valuable, and produced a set of compelling art pieces.
I see two ways to respond to this paper – one with a focus on the underlying project and the other with a focus on the paper. I will do both.

The Project:
I am very supportive of these kinds of collaborations. SciArt collaborations as a subset of interdisciplinary work (or what I prefer to call pluralistic collaboration) are an important feature of broadened conceptions of scientific work. As the paper points out, such collaborations have strong local benefits in creating meaningful experiences and relationships between the contributors and in providing the opportunity to produce meaningful pieces that can engage with public audiences. Such projects can have a meaningful impact on public discourse and knowledge about science. They are also important opportunities for scientists, in particular, to get out of their worlds and to see and engage the world in new ways – in the best case, they lead to new science or new kinds of scientific practice. The idea of setting up such a collaboration explicitly as an experiment with five different cases is a novel and interesting proposition, and well worth doing.
All that being said, I think that the authors could have done more to formulate this as both a rich collaboration and a challenging experiment. As a collaboration, simple pairs of “a scientist and an artist” have been done innumerable times, and as such, this structure promises little beyond the specific artistic output and the specific professional connection developed within the pair. These are fine goals, and such a project is definitely worth doing for the reasons I list above, but I am not convinced that this version offers much that is new to the SciArt literature. In other words, this project seems to be more set up to accomplish some local goals than to produce new knowledge or insights appropriate for a journal. Doing the latter would require new forms of collaboration that might test some boundary or push knowledge in some unexpected or remarkable way. The project does not do that.
Nor does the project function particularly well as an experiment – its petri dish “mix and observe” set-up does not test or promulgate any underlying theory of what should be mixed and why. As such, it does not seem to be testing anything in particular. Naturalistic experiments have their place, but are most interesting when observing a novel configuration, not when establishing a commonly used collaborative structure. There are many ways that this project could have been subtly or explicitly tweaked that would have produced much more robust results.

The Paper:
While there are some insights offered by the paper, none are pushed very far and thus the learning and generalizability offered by this paper is relatively low. For the most part, this feels like a report on an interesting project (though see my notes above) with some reflections rather than a systematic analysis intended to derive significant new knowledge from that project. Different groups assumed different roles: some succeeded, some failed. But what can we learn from the specific differences? Are there any patterns? Anything generalizable? I want to know what we can learn from this project beyond the observation that relationships were built and that each project took its own course.
Toward rectifying this lack of analysis, I briefly offer three missed opportunities for extension, theorizing, and discussion.
My first thought was triggered by the observation that there was “no real storming stage” (line 115). This seems significant in understanding the kind of project that has been established – there is no cognitive friction or clash of values, worldviews, or perspectives. This recognition speaks to the joint acknowledgements later in the paper that while the collaborations provided “new perspectives” for the scientists, these perspectives “did not influence their work.” Thus, despite the conclusion asserting that Portraits of Climate “ultimately fostered new means of knowledge production and outreach”, neither of those outcomes was evident to any significant extent in the reported details. New forms of knowledge production are not conceptualized, and outreach is explicitly eschewed as a project goal at the outset of the paper.
The authors suggest instead that the value of the project is relational – that the participants for the most part felt more connected to each other after the project. But there is not really an exploration of forms of relationality or any sense for why some collaborations worked and others did not. In other words, the finding of connection is a thin outcome and in no way surprising – opportunities to build relations often build relations. We get only the thinnest explanation for the choice to focus on relationality rather than changing scientific practice or knowledge, challenging existing approaches, or science communication, and no real exploration of the consequences of that choice for the value of the project.
And so, the conclusion that creating comfortable spaces for collaboration are more likely to lead to success really begs the question. If success is mere completion of a project, this is true. If success is learning or furthering knowledge, I am seeing little evidence or discussion to support this position. A more fruitful approach for the paper may be an exploration of how to create situations of mutual respect amongst disagreement or discomfort. Asking this kind of question could be the basis for a real experiment, but would send the project in a very different direction. And, this would certainly shift the focus of the analysis from what is “valued” by the participants to what has “value” for either the science or the social science communities.
A second opportunity that the paper seems to overlook is in comparing the individual arts-pieces’ insights to each other. What can be said about the fact that “Mysterium Völlii” provides a narrative of resilience, “Journey Through Time” a narrative of crisis, and “The Little Shrimps” a narrative of the Anthropocene? What does this tell us about the way that different scientists (or artists?) craft and understand value in their work? How do these different narratives shape a coherent public engagement project around climate change? Or leaning into the focus of the paper itself, is the value of a more open development process precisely that individual projects can come to very different conclusions about where we sit in the world of climate change, and does this have value in itself? A deeper engagement with the outcomes of the project in relation to the process could provide an interesting and informative lens on what happened, within the frame of the existing project structure.
Finally, I was also struck by the notion that “this realization underscored the fundamental humanity of craft and skill” (line 236). Combined with the later insight that science and art are similar in crucial ways (section 3.5), and the much earlier note that science and art differ in their relation to clarity and ambiguity (86-87), there is a missed opportunity here to explore the nature of their similarities and difference around craft, skill, communication, and epistemology. As I note above, I think that there is epistemic value in discomfort, so this similarity is what actually bothers me about many SciArt collaborations. Can you convince me that the value of similarity and comfort outweighs the value of discomfort and difference in collaboration?

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-5213-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Anna Pagnone, 10 Jun 2026
  
  Response to Saul E. Halfon
  Novelty:
  The reviewer criticizes that the setting we used is not new and that new forms are needed to “test some boundary or push knowledge in some unexpected or remarkable way”. Yes, this setup of art&science collaborations has been used many times before. This is no negative aspect. To stretch the analogy a bit: many studies are using the same particular set of climate models. Climate experiments are even standardized (e.g. CMIP6, Eyring et al. 2016). Nevertheless, every new analysis of standardized experiments offers novel nuance and knowledge. Different iterations of similar experiments, with slightly different settings and foci will produce new insights. Similarly, similar settings in art&science collaborations, with different foci, bring new results. We looked at co-creation and co-authorship between artist and scientist, and on their perceptions of co-creation and co-authorship, and how this is modulated by facilitating environment, conflicts, expectations, external factors, geography, etc. The combined effect of all particularities of this project, their interpersonal relations, are certainly unique to this experience. The core of this manuscript is the human-centering, thus centering the discussion on the humans, not on scientists and artists, each collaboration is new and unique with the potential to test boundaries and push knowledge, no matter if the format has been used many times.
  Experiment:
  The diversity of collaborations was essential to our experimental approach. This allows us to draw conclusions on the impact of the groups' composition on the outcome and to look at the universal factors that make such projects successful. All teams made use of the same environment and total freedom to develop their projects: this is the common ground that allows for comparison and analysis. Having several different mix-and-observe set-ups characterized by diversity in choices, ways of working, resulting dynamics, allows us to extract the ingredients (trust, communication, etc.) that are essential even in diverse pairings. We consider it counterproductive, from the point of view of the artistic freedom and production, to set rigid boundaries in forming the teams and the environment around them.
  It was a "real experiment" (even without a hypothesis testing) as we gained knowledge from the particular experience, by observing and analyzing the different dynamics and paths taken among teams as well as the interviews. We acknowledge that the take-home messages were not stated clearly enough to convince the reviewer of a rigorous scientific approach. We suggest to emphasize these results even more by adding a few paragraphs with summarizing statements after each of the case studies or each of the sections, and bring back more material with details of how each team collaborated as well as the conflicts.
  Reflection on the “storming stage”:
  In the manuscript we wrote: “a smooth forming stage; no real storming stage; a norming stage in which roles got clearer, and which also continued during the performing stage; a three-phase performing stage; an adjourning stage.” The three-phase performing phase is composed of exchange, develop, produce. We thank the reviewer for pointing their doubt about the “storming stage”. It was poor phrase from our side, an unfortunate choice of words and a too shortened description. We are happy to change the paper to make this clearer as per their suggestion. Indeed, there have been several “storming stages”, and not only in the initial phase. Even in the "successful" cases of collaboration, the beginning always involved a clash of two worlds, the bending of expectations, compromise, understanding. Further, we observed personal disagreement (“Frustration made the artist almost drop out of the project.” (157-158)) and disagreement in the approach (“Another challenge was that the research object of one team was very dynamic: the initial plans of filming in the field could not be pursued due to unexpected ecological changes and the resulting worries of the local community.” (158-160). To be added the problem of how the situation was handled).
  We dedicate section 4.2 Challenges to collaboration to communication and authorship as two main challenges to collaboration, and 5.1 Open framework: Opportunity and challenge also reveals frictions within the process. We would like to extend section 3.5 Similarities to Similarities and Differences or Harmony and Tension to add some inedited material on the tensions that arise when working in art&science.
  Knowledge production and Outreach:
  We’d like to recall that the focus of our manuscript is “specifically, on how exchange takes place, where the “co” in collaboration and co-creation sparks and which factors may hinder it.” (50-51), thus on the people. This is why “New forms of knowledge production are not conceptualized, and outreach is explicitly eschewed as a project goal at the outset of the paper.” Outreach was not the goal of our project, but part of the process as a restitution to society of our work. Similarly, fostering new means of knowledge production was not expected by the collaborations, though it happened for some, but not all. There was intellectual growth, roles where overcome by some, critical reflection was everywhere. It is also noted that a specific challenge in this kind of collaboration is that both scientists as well as artists, if really excited about what they are doing and if really pushing boundaries in both their fields, are by nature extreme individuals, burning for “truth”, for “precision”, for the (so far) unspeakable that they fight for. Therefore, pairing them is a challenge and needs the perspective of the personal level.
  Questions that “send the project in a very different direction”:
  The reviewer suggests several questions and directions the paper could go/could have gone. For example, “an exploration of how to create situations of mutual respect amongst disagreement or discomfort” or “comparing the individual arts-pieces’ insights to each other” or “How do these different narratives shape a coherent public engagement project around climate change?”. While these are for sure interesting questions, they are not ours. We decided the focus of our work to the human-centered lens of observation. We do appreciate suggestions that regard our story and are happy to include them in the discussion and outlook.
  Friction as source of innovation:
  Unfortunately, we see this as a recurring prejudice in the reviewer’s comments on our manuscript. Novelty cannot only result from friction, disagreement, or discomfort. Novelty can also result from peaceful discovery and mutual respect. Our study finds that novelty and creativity can flourish through tense but also through harmonic situations. They can be silenced by too much tension and also by too much harmony (as also described in psychology and management literature).
  Provocatively, the review poses this last question “Can you convince me that the value of similarity and comfort outweighs the value of discomfort and difference in collaboration?”. We do not intend to convince the reviewer, or the reader, of this. This is not the point of our paper. The dichotomy between comfort/similarity versus discomfort/difference, intended in this question, does not necessarily result in higher or lower levels of success, in any definition, we believe. The relationship is probably much more nuanced than this rather simplistic polarized view. Sometimes one predominates, other times the other does. Quantifying this relation is still not possible, and we did not dare to try it. We would also like to raise that there is certain toxicity in pushing “the necessity for friction” without distinguishing between exactly where or how the friction acts. On the one hand, friction in constructively diverging opinions and points of view can (or cannot) lead to increased team performance and novelty. On the other hand, friction in interpersonal relations, false expectations, abused hierarchy, and imbalanced work load etc. may very well lead to negative outcomes. Insisting in friction as a necessary means for novelty goes against well-established criteria for a healthy work environment in terms of mental health and psychological safety.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-5213-AC2

Anna Pagnone, Jörn Behrens, David Marcolino Nielsen, Linda Jetter, Lluc Vayreda Calbó, Sam Burton-Weiss, Dit Coesebrink, Daniele Alef Grillo, Carl Maria Kemper, Nana Petzet, and Jenni Schurr

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Jan 2026	182	125	20	327
Feb 2026	86	125	14	225
Mar 2026	130	93	8	231
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Short summary

In "Portraits of Climate", we examine dynamics and roles in art–science collaborations and find that success depends less on one- or two-way exchange, or fixed or blended artist/scientist roles, than on openness, trust, and mutual understanding. Participants' subjective views often differ from external assessments and from each other. The project showed how such collaborations foster growth, role expansion, and new ways to address environmental challenges.


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