Programs · Climate House
Programs
Climate House is preparing to launch along two program pathways—Los Angeles and At-Large—while laying the foundation for institution-level programs.
The Los Angeles program explores policy opportunities specific to the region, with particular attention to the conditions that enable the region and its residents to thrive. The At-Large program explores the conditions shaping public life across geographies while highlighting opportunities to address them across audiences, places, and scales.
Together, the two pathways allow Climate House to move between the specificity of place and the shared conditions of a changing climate: creating opportunities for place-based work to inform transnational exchange, and vice versa.
Institution-level programs are being developed to foster meaningful collaboration between the art and policy worlds—to stage art, culture, and policy interventions for a changing climate and help generate cultural momentum for change.
Inaugural Programs
Toward a Water Commons: Whiplash Files, LA
The Los Angeles program begins with Whiplash Files, LA Edition, exploring responses to the region’s increasingly volatile water conditions. Hydroclimate whiplash refers to the rapid shift between extreme wet and dry periods, which can turn intense rainfall into runoff and flooding rather than strategically stored water, while prolonged dry periods strain supplies. The project emphasizes three interconnected interventions: rainwater capture and reuse, living infrastructure, and dechanneling the river.
A portfolio of cultural initiatives will bring these possibilities into public experience, anchored by the immersive media exhibition, BRADBAORI by Joshua Ashish Dawson. BRADBAORI reimagines the iconic Downtown Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building as a baori, or South Asian community stepwell, transforming it into a cultural gathering place and water commons. Those in Los Angeles can get a sneak peak of Dawson's work from October through January by stopping by 8497 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood to catch a clip of his film at the top of the hour, every hour. The full exhibition is planned to run between March and April 2027 in Santa Monica.
A complementary sonic field research and participatory art project, Tuning Into Whiplash, is being developed in partnership with the Los Angeles Field Recording Club. Tuning Into Whiplash will document hydroclimate whiplash across the LA watershed. Accumulated field recordings will inform the sonic compositions, listening programs, and a public soundscape installation. Tuning Into Whiplash is planned to launch in Fall 2027.
Additional programming will include interdisciplinary conversations and panels, educational programs, field-recording outings and listening walks, site-specific activations, and civic authorship salons bringing artists, researchers, organizers, policymakers, practitioners, and the public into shared inquiry and collective efforts to reshape the worlds we inhabit.
Forest Encounters
Forest Encounters is the first program in Climate House’s At-Large series: an ongoing platform to showcase opportunities to protect the world's old growth forests and cultivate intimate sensory encounters with them through the places, materials, and products that connect us. It includes forest-linked soundscapes, participatory art publications, listening sculptures, and policy mechanisms presented through installations, performances, dining experiences, sonic and visual mediums, and exhibitions.
Designed to circulate through cultural institutions, restaurants, festivals, galleries, and other public settings, Forest Encounters will build toward larger exhibitions and marketplaces in locations with active forest-protection campaigns. Each work incorporates pathways for forest protection, including royalty distributions, shared-revenue models with forest-protection organizations, model policy frameworks, and references to existing tools for policymakers, market actors, and the public.
This program is currently in production, with early components set to launch in late 2026 through 2027.
Art x Policy Pilot Initiatives
Climate House is developing pilot programs exploring how contemporary artistic research and practice can be guided to engage complex policy questions and stage policy opportunities that respond to our changing climate.
The initiative will take two complementary forms: short-form educational programs bringing artists, researchers, social movement scholars, and policy practitioners into shared inquiry; and artist residencies supporting the development of new work in dialogue with policy research and real-world policy questions.
Initial program development is focused on partnerships with international institutions in contemporary art and cultural research, with early pilots designed to test models that can grow across institutions, disciplines, and policy contexts.