Chris Combs' Latest Artwork Tells a Six-Minute Climate Change Story on a Four-Digit LCD Display

Electronic artist Chris Combs has turned a birch branch into a glimpse into a potential future of unchecked climate change — using a simple four-digit LCD panel to tell a six-minute story.

"This is my piece in the show, '1.5 Degrees,'" Combs explains of the project, which is being showcased as part of a three-person group show by members of the Otis Street Arts Project. "It uses a temperature display — four digits, a degree symbol, and a few decimal points —to tell you a story from an imagined future in which our planetary climate has collapsed. The display is embedded in a small birch branch, anchored with a highly polished brass foot. A small warm LED illuminates the screen. The story takes about six minutes to read, and loops continuously."

The art piece's name comes from the concept of a "tipping point," identified by climate scientists as a 1.5° increase in temperature over pre-industrial levels. If the temperature, averaged out over a decade of measurements, reaches this point, scientific consensus suggests that extreme weather events — everything from once-in-a-lifetime storms to droughts and heatwaves — will become considerably more common, with the potential of a runaway effect driving further temperature increases in a vicious feedback cycle.

While the display embedded in the branch, which is in turn anchored on a foot of highly polished brass, was originally designed to simply display the readings from a temperature sensor, Combs had a challenge to tell a story: "It was both fun and 'fun' to write for such a highly-constrained format," he explains, "[with] four letters max, only 17 letters available. I'd like to give a shout-out to my pal /usr/share/dict/words and my new regex friend '/^[abcdefghijlnoprsuy]{1,4}$/p'."

Despite those limitations — the display being ill-suited to representing any letters other than the 17 above — Combs was able to come up with a poetic story, displayed on-screen over the course of six minutes before looping back to the start. The full text of the story, for the curious, is available in Combs' Mastodon thread on the project.