Climate change prognostics are often abstract and therefore difficult to understand for most people. Yet, the threat of a climate crisis is real and we should all be aware of its extensive effects. We translated scientific climate data into something visually captivating and thus made it understandable for everyone.

Together with leading climatologists we calculated the impact of a global increase in temperatures. To show that just a few degrees more can turn the world into an uncomfortable place, we tilted a museum’s landscape paintings by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict.

In 2022, museums became the arena for the most pressing issue of our time – the climate debate – to warn about the effects of global warming. A warning that scientists have been issuing for years: an increase of the world’s climate by over 1.5 degrees that will throw nature off balance globally. But most people can’t seem to grasp the significance of this data and what will happen if the global climate rises just a few degrees more.

Like in other museums around the globe, climate activists staged an "art attack" in the Leopold Museum in November 2022. Protesters from the "Last Generation" movement threw black paint on the painting "Death and Life" by Gustav Klimt.

Although the museum didn't quite like the way the cause was presented, they understood the reasons behind it and fully support the goals of the "Last Generation". Nonetheless, the rather destructive nature of these protests caused a lot of criticism by the public and raised the question if there wasn't a better, less invasive way of conveying an environmental message. After all, museums always have been places dedicated to learning and challenging one's own way of thinking.

So we showed the world a better, more dialogue-oriented way of using the public spaces, exhibits and audiences that museums provide for a good cause.

To show that just a few degrees more can turn the world into an uncomfortable place, we tilted the Leopold Museum’s world-famous landscape paintings by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict.

Together with scientists, meteorologists and climatologists from the Climate Change Centre Austria, the country's leading institution for climate effect research, we calculated the impact of a global increase in temperatures and translated the degrees in temperature into degrees of angles and then tilted the museum’s celebrated landscape paintings by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict. The campaign is an innovative contribution to make abstract scientific data intuitively and vividly comprehensible and to confront people with an uncomfortable truth in a completely new context. In the surroundings of a museum of world renown in the heart of Vienna, we reached a broader audience and obtained a deeper involvement with the subject matter than a climate report or environmental study would.

Climate change prognostics and the data warning us about the devastating effects of global warming are often very abstract and difficult to understand. We translated abstract climate data into something visually gripping and thus made it more accessible to everyone.

Together with leading climatologists we calculated the impact of a global increase in temperatures to then show that just a few degrees more can turn the world into an uncomfortable place. We tilted the museum’s landscape paintings by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict. We used the motifs of these landscape and nature paintings to talk about the effects that global warming has on the painted regions: how sea levels will rise, trees and forests will vanish, ground water will dry-up or biodiversity will diminish. We used the art of famous painters to visually narrate what could happen if climate change worsened.

After a week of leaving visitors guessing, we revealed our intervention – on prime-time national TV, on the exact day the UN climate report was published.

By tilting world famous artworks – worth hundreds of millions – we turned them into warning signs of a nature in imbalance and reached a broader audience for this difficult but highly relevant topic.

The press from all over the world immediately picked up the story. Media outlets such as abc News, The Washington Post, Agence France Press, Reuters, China Daily, Japan News, Forbes, Süddeutsche Zeitung and many more featured the campaign in their coverage in print, online and on TV.

Thus, a simple twist translated abstract data into an art installation, generated around 540 million media impressions in only 3 weeks with almost zero budget and changed people’s perspectives on the effects of a few degrees more.