The Art Switch Festival returns to New York with a citywide program of public events presented in collaboration with Transparent Eyeball, a Prague-based science and visual arts collective. Building on the 2023 festival Nature Thinking, this year’s edition turns its focus toward the transformations and rhythms of the world we live in. Sensing Change draws on process philosophy and resilience thinking to reimagine how we, humans, perceive and participate in the continual transformations of the living world, along with many other, non-human entities.

Unfolding through a citywide series of talks, performances, and interventions, Sensing Change brings together artists, scientists, and cultural thinkers to explore how both visible and imperceptible shifts in nature are sensed, measured, and embodied over time. Within this framework, artists and scientists act as cartographers and system-builders; tracing natural patterns, gathering ecological data, and opening new possibilities for how we perceive, imagine, and inhabit a living world.

The heart of Sensing Change lies in the transformations unfolding within geological, botanical, and animal systems. These dynamic processes encompass the intricate, often invisible exchanges that govern growth, adaptation, and evolution across scales, from the molecular to the planetary. In the spirit of process philosophy, reality is understood not as a collection of fixed objects, but as an ongoing flux in which forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure. Resilience thinking extends this view, focusing on the capacity of ecological, social, and cultural systems to absorb disturbance, reorganize, and adapt in the face of change.

From the flight path of a migrating bird to the hum of a thawing glacier, from a plant bending toward light to a chemical trace in disturbed soil, each gesture reveals an interconnected world. These are not only scientific phenomena but also signs of communication, resistance, and adaptation. Sensing Change investigates ecologies of perception, and the ways in which living systems interact and transform.

At a moment when climate data can feel abstract or overwhelming, Sensing Change proposes another kind of measurement through attention, memory, imagination, and embodied experience. What does it mean to witness change not only with instruments but with our senses and our care? By cultivating sensitivity to the slow and often unseen rhythms of transformation, Sensing Change calls for a deeper kind of listening, the one that recognizes the planet not as backdrop, but as collaborator.

Sensing Change is supported by the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic, Teiger Foundation, and 1014 Space for Ideas.