Artist-researcher sends climate science from lab to low-Earth orbit

When a satellite orbiting 220 miles above Earth recorded a three-minute video about carbon dioxide this spring, it also captured the culmination of a Cornell collaboration spanning art, engineering and climate science.

The project began in a chemical engineering laboratory and evolved through one student’s effort to transform research exploring new ways to recycle carbon dioxide, a major driver of climate change, into an artwork designed to orbit the planet it seeks to help protect.

Claire Choi ’28, an artist and undergraduate researcher in the Hanrath Energy Lab led by Tobias Hanrath, Croll Professor in the R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and director of the Cornell Energy Transition Initiative in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering, created “CO2,” a video concept selected for the Xu Bing Space Art Residency Program. The project emerged from Cornell’s culture of collaboration, bringing together artistic practice, engineering research and questions of planetary sustainability.

The artwork draws directly on research underway in Hanrath’s lab, which explores new approaches to electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion. Rather than treating carbon dioxide solely as a waste product, the lab explores how it can become a resource, transforming CO2 into useful fuels and materials through electrolysis. A distinctive approach pioneered by the lab treats electricity not merely as the driving force behind the chemical transformation, but as an information carrier: carefully timed pulses of electricity communicate with the catalyst, coaxing it to perform beyond what it could achieve under a constant voltage. Those scientific ideas became the foundation for Choi’s artwork, demonstrating how engineering research can inspire new ways of seeing humanity’s relationship with Earth’s changing climate.

On May 9, Choi’s piece was uploaded to a screen mounted on the SCA-2 satellite and recorded by an onboard camera as the spacecraft passed over the Indian Ocean. During filming, the satellite traveled more than 800 miles, capturing shifting views of Earth, its atmosphere and the surrounding darkness of space.

For Choi, the collaboration transformed how she thought about art, engineering and climate science, revealing them not as separate pursuits but as complementary ways of understanding the same problem.

“Reinventing what something is, is also what art does,” Choi said. “This project didn’t feel like translating two separate disciplines. It felt like making the same move in two places.”

That idea also shaped the conceptual framework of the artwork itself.

“Carbon dioxide appears at every scale at once: molecule, atmosphere, electrode, planet,” reads the project description. “Held within a single frame, unresolved.”

The artwork’s central concept reflects ideas Choi encountered in Hanrath’s research: that catalysis can be reimagined as a conversation. Where most human-made systems, like the catalytic converter in a car, run under steady conditions, nature embraces dynamics – in enzymes for example, everything moves in time.

“If you’re brave enough to embrace that complexity, the catalyst can do things it otherwise couldn’t,” Hanrath said, adding that because the dialogue happens through electrical signals, artificial intelligence can eventually learn to optimize it. For Choi, that interplay of rhythm, information and matter offered a way to think about carbon dioxide across scales, from microscopic interactions to planetary systems.

What sets “CO2” apart from a traditional video is its setting. Residency artists upload their work to a display aboard a satellite, where a nearby camera records it against the ever-changing backdrop of Earth and space. As coastlines, clouds and the planet’s atmospheric edge drift behind the artwork, the orbital environment becomes part of the piece itself, placing a laboratory discovery about carbon dioxide in direct conversation with the planet it seeks to understand. The video also incorporates Earth- and space-based imagery from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

Xu Bing, the residency’s founder, said Choi’s proposal stood out because it grew directly from active scientific research, bringing together rigorous engineering and artistic inquiry in a way rarely seen among applicants. Chosen through the program’s international open call, Choi was selected alongside established international artists and is among the residency’s youngest participants.

“What distinguishes Claire Choi’s work is its strong scientific rigor,” Xu Bing said. While many residency artists engage with technology, he noted that proposals rooted directly in scientific research are rare. “It brings a more diverse perspective to the field of art and technology.”

Xu Bing, whose work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum, served as an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell from 2015 to 2023, engaging with students across disciplines and presenting major installations at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

For Hanrath, the collaboration demonstrates how Cornell’s culture of crossing disciplinary boundaries can expand both scientific discovery and public understanding. By bringing together art, engineering, climate science and computational thinking, the project reflects the university’s “any person … any study” ethos, connecting molecular-scale research with planetary questions and inviting audiences to see both through a new lens.

Seeing the finished work suspended against Earth’s horizon reinforced the collaboration’s central idea: that understanding planetary challenges requires perspectives that span disciplines as readily as they span scales.

“It made literal something I’d thought about since I was a kid,” Choi said. “Your whole neighborhood is your whole world then. Five miles or 93 billion light-years, both might as well be infinite. If a viewer comes away holding both at once, the indifference and the mark we leave in it, that’s the piece.”