Warming! Hard Hot Area

TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION

Interactive multisensory installation (thermochromic touch devices, midi controller, video-mapping sensor)

CONCEPT

Warming! is an interactive multisensory installation that investigates the transformation of the global discourse on climate change into a direct, embodied experience. The work departs from the framework of international conventions on global warming—an abstract, statistical, and normative language—and translates it into a system of immediate reactions triggered by the human body.

The iconic image of the Earth—Blue Marble, first photographed from outer space in the 1970s—long functioned as a symbol of planetary fragility and unity. In recent decades, this image has progressively metamorphosed into the representation of an overheated sphere, caught in an irreversible process of destabilization. Warming! proposes a paradigmatic shift: from distant cosmic contemplation to direct touch, from image to temperature, from representation to responsibility.

Tactile Devices as a Critical Medium

The installation is composed of an ensemble of circular surfaces made of thermochromic materials, arranged like fragments of a planet or cells of a living organism. These surfaces respond to the audience’s touch by registering individual thermal imprints. Color changes occur gradually, visually marking the transfer of heat between the human body and the material in a slow, organic process that cannot be artificially accelerated.

This chromatic transformation functions as an indicator of impact: each touch becomes a micro-intervention, a symbolic contribution to the warming of the system. In this way, the work introduces the notion of distributed co-responsibility.

Sensory Ecologies: Sound, Light, Reaction

The thermal imprint symbolically triggers a set of ambient sonic and visual transformations, correlated with predefined codes that may reference climatic data, critical thresholds, or speculative scenarios. Sound becomes a barometer of imbalance, while light forms an unstable ecosystem, sensitive to human intervention.

Real plants integrated into the installation act as biological witnesses, intensifying the tension between organic life and the technological systems that monitor, translate, and transform it into data. The relationship between the natural and the artificial is not illustrative, but one of fragile interdependence.

The Body as a Climatic Agent

Through its tactile dimension, Warming! re-centers the human body as a climatic agent. Ordinary gestures—touching, pressing, exploring—are charged with symbolic consequences. The work suggests that global warming is not a distant phenomenon, but a process that begins with each body present. The presence of hands introduces an ethical and intergenerational dimension: who touches, who leaves traces, and who inherits the consequences?

Warming! as Title and Warning

The title Warming! functions simultaneously on multiple levels:

• as a technical term associated with climate change,
• as a perceptible physical state,
• as a warning.

The exclamation mark signals urgency as well as ambiguity: it is not merely an announcement, but a call. The work offers no solutions and proposes no salvational narratives. Instead, it creates a space of embodied awareness, in which each participant becomes an active part of the system under investigation.

Oasis. Green Identity