Communicating the science behind climate change is a challenge.
But when you present these concepts in an artistic way and make the data beautiful, it’s more engaging and easier to understand. And more likely to inspire climate action.
Nicole Kelner is Artist-in-Residence at My Climate Journey, where she communicates the complex challenges of climate change in a beautiful, accessible way.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Nicole joins Ross, Siobhan, and Asa to explore why people are drawn to her watercolor representations of scientific data and explain her efforts to communicate climate concepts accurately.
Nicole describes how she incorporates humor in her artwork and brainstorms ideas for a potential collaboration with the Nori Meme Lab.
Listen in to understand how Nicole thinks about AI-generated art and learn how her work makes a meaningful difference in the fight against climate change.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
‘Seaweed Ecosystems May Not Mitigate CO2 Emissions’ in ICES Journal of Marine Science
‘Colors of Climate: Nicole Kelner’s Watercolors Bring Calm to Images of Climate Change’ in The Verge
Carbon Removal Memes on Twitter
Carbon Removal Memes on Instagram
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of the Nori carbon removal marketplace, and I’m also the creative editor there. We have a fun CDR happy hour show today, Asa Kamer, making an unexpected appearance. I didn’t know you were going to even be here, Asa.
Asa Kamer: I’m always ready to jump in for any happy hour appearance.
Ross Kenyon: That’s good. Keeping it like kind of Kamer-y, just busting through the door of our event.
Asa Kamer: Yeah. Compilation of all my entrances one day.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I bet there’s a supercut. Okay. Editors, post producers listening to this show right now and go find the supercut of every time Kamer bursts into Jerry’s apartment. My favorite super cut of those is there’s one of Harrison Ford being like, my wife, that’s my wife and family. And it’s like all the videos, all like clips of him from movies trying to protect his family from things. Apparently people are always threatening Harrison Ford’s family.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Sounds like that one with the president plane, when he’s like president on the plane. My family goes first or whatever it is.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, is that like Air Force One or what is that?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Air Force One, good callback.
Ross Kenyon: There you go. So this is like high quality carbon removal content. We’re pumping out to the people. Siobhan Montoya-Lavender here too from Thanks a ton. Her and Asa both do fun meme work here at Nori. That’s why we’re all here. And Nicole Kelner, you are here. You exist.
Nicole Kelner: Hello. Hello.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, artist and resident at My Climate Journey doing amazing climate communications work. And you have a book coming out, I see. I saw you were debating various sizes for books. How do you even decide that thing? I feel like I would agonize over that and then choose the wrong thing.
Nicole Kelner: Oh, that’s where I’m at right now. It’s a larger-sized book, and it is much more difficult to make, so that is where I’m at.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: There you go. You listened to Twitter, and now you’re paying the price.
Nicole Kelner: Yep, yep.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Nicole, we are just excited to have you on the show, and I’ve been following you since kind of the inception of you, I think, was it the climate change? Was that like the first thing you put out? Because I remember like maybe six or nine months ago, you put out shades for banner backgrounds. I have used them that day as my banner backgrounds. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I love them. And so then it’s kind of like you split on the scene and all of a sudden I’m like, oh, Nicole Kelner’s making with art.
Oh, Nicole Kelner’s doing the installation reaction and breaking it down. And, you know, people in her clothes and stuff. So tell us a little bit about how it started.
Nicole Kelner: They weren’t even supposed to be climate focused at the beginning, but about 10 days in, I painted one about kelp and carbon sequestration. I love that one. Yeah, that was like my first climate one and Twitter liked it. And I was like, oh, interesting. I was not, I was like a Twitter lurker up until that point. Not like a person that tweeted ever. I was very timid to tweet and it got like over a hundred likes. And I was like, wow, this is more likes than anything I’ve ever had in mind.
Maybe I should do more of these. And so the rest of the 100 days, I decided to paint all about climate change and climate change solutions.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yes, that’s awesome. And wait, are you a artist by training? Do you have like an academic background? And is this something you picked up?
Nicole Kelner: Nope, I did not come from an art background or a climate background. I am self-taught in both. Before this, I had co-founded an after-school program to teach kids how to code and sold that in 2019 and since then have been transitioning into climate and kind of wayfinding and yeah, was working at a climate startup up until April and now I’m full-time climate artist.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. And then what is it like being an artist in residence at My Climate Journey? How did that deal fall into place and how’s it work? I don’t think people probably have a lot of experience with artists in residence programs.
Nicole Kelner: I was super involved in my climate journey since around the beginning of the launch of the Slack group. When there was about 500 folks in there, I found the community and just fell in love with it and started trying to help in any way I could. I’ve had a relationship with the team there for quite some time. When I started painting, they just were so supportive and we got reconnected. At one point, we just started a conversation with the idea of, what if we had an artist in residence? Just brainstorm together what we could kind of make that happen and now I host monthly workshops.
I do these climate art workshops and so we pick a theme every month and like last month we did a solar punk theme and painted kind of like utopian versions of like the cities we all were living in and things like that. My art is featured in their newsletter every week and I’m working on a new kind of special Content creation thing that you’ll see live in the next few weeks.
Ross Kenyon: That’s pretty fun. Unexpected too, that this almost sounds accidental or just one of those things of life where you probably wouldn’t have predicted this would have been your career and your next step. Is there any way of knowing?
Nicole Kelner: I truly could not have imagined. Like 10 months ago, this is very much a plot twist in my life if I imagined it.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I’m going to go ahead and pull up NicoleKellner.com. And for those of you listening, if you want to follow along, we’re going to go to her page and then check out her prints and look at some of the artwork she’s done.
Ross Kenyon: You say you just started painting? This is like a very new skill that you have?
Nicole Kelner: Yeah, I mean, I grew up loving art. I took art through high school. Like I took AP art, which I guess is, you know, not your typical AP, but I was not trained any more than a high school amount of art and have since then kind of, you know, for fun, done watercolors every once in a while and have always found them very soothing. But Never to this consistency or yeah, tried to become an artist. That was never a plan of mine per se.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Okay, well, it’s turning out for you. So we’re looking at her kelp plus carbon sequestration, which she mentioned earlier is the piece of art she posted to Twitter that kind of kicked off the whole Climate theme in terms of artwork. And so what we’re looking at is the process of kelp being grown in the deep ocean and sunk to the deep ocean floor. And what I was asking her is, you know, do you ever get kind of like the naysayers, the scientific naysayers that are like, oh, the ratio is off for the depth or this is an entirely accurate representation.
Have you come up against any of that?
Nicole Kelner: I actually haven’t. I feel like I found a very nice corner of the Twitter internet that is just excited for climate communication to be occurring and climate science to be talked about. Though I’m like taking, you know, liberties of creative control, I’m still communicating the concepts in a pretty accurate way. And I do like my absolute best to fact check and like use multiple resources and like cite my sources and More recently, I’ve been even asking experts in the field to hop on a call and like fact check me like for the IRA piece.
Like I was like, hey, does anyone know anyone at Rewiring America that I can talk to because I’m using their calculator and I just really want to make sure I’m getting this right. And so I do my research. And yeah, I mean, I can’t show the full depth of the ocean in a Instagram sized piece. But yeah, I think As someone looks at it, they generally understand the concept and I’m able to, you know, create when I’m doing something that’s like more statistic based, like if it’s a graph and it needs to like correlate to numbers, I will be like very proportionate of like the bar chart, for example, and I’ll print out a correlating chart and make sure I’m matching the like those angles and the height and everything.
So Yeah, I do my best to make it work and not make any scientists mad.
Ross Kenyon: Siobhan, you’re so traumatized from your meme making that you that question.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, I think that was coming from a personal place where I think a lot of times when you’re trying to communicate something and it’s not in a like classic graph or chart formats. And it’s in a way that we’re trying to capture a new audience. You know, sometimes you have to take a little creative liberty to like land the joke or to, you know, fit the art in, as you say. And, you know, I think sometimes scientists can come for you, but I’m glad they haven’t come for you yet. May they never.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve had like debates about like, do we just put for the text caption on Twitter, you just put an asterisk and then you list all of the things that didn’t fit in the meme without completely ruining the joke and whether or not that’s actually funny or just damn the torpedoes, publish the meme.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: We have, we have. But I mean, to your point, like I have noticed, I’ve seen you call out on Twitter, like, hey, you know, you’ve cited things on Twitter. I’ve seen you like post the original graph that you like took something from or asked people on Twitter what you should be painting. Obviously, my favorite ones are all the carbon dioxide removal ones. There is the DCS versus CDR versus DACC. And I feel like I’m constantly trying to explain the difference between carbon removal and carbon capture. And yet here you have these tiny short sentences in this relatively barren piece of art.
And I feel like you really encapsulated it. Like I see it, I look at it and I’m immediately like, yep, that’s the difference right there.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah, so that one, I used the Carbon 180 graphic and they, with permission, was able to paint this one and was really excited. And the worst part about it was when I posted it, I swapped the titles by accident.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, God.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Capture over the ambient air.
Nicole Kelner: When I was editing the last piece, I was cleaning things up and somehow it got mixed up. And luckily, I had someone message me right away and I was able to fix it before basically anyone saw, but I’m still traumatized by this piece.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like a massive own goal.
Nicole Kelner: This is exactly what I don’t want to do, spread misinformation. But yeah, now that it’s accurate, I am very happy with that one.
Ross Kenyon: I respect the sharing of that. That does sound not like a very fun experience, but it’s nice you’re able to laugh about it so much.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, no kidding. These have been very popular. I’ve seen that you’ve done an art show recently. You’re already doing prints on fabric. People are wearing your art. Why do you think the people are so drawn to watercolor representations of scientific data?
Nicole Kelner: There’s not really many people doing it. It’s a very odd niche I’ve created for myself. I think that it’s something that is just like pretty to begin with and like grabs you like with the bright colors and for the people in our industry, like it’s something that they like really resonate with. Like how I’ve listened to some of your other episodes with like me, like when you’re talking about memes, it’s like, You know, you guys talk about like direct air capture memes and it’s like the people who get them, they get them and like they feel seen by them.
And I think my art has that same like emotion where I’m talking about very specific, like odd things that people in our world like really are, you know, researching and care about a lot. And when they see it communicated beautifully, like that resonates a lot with them. So I think that’s part of it. I think that You know, like the climate stripes one, like this is something we’ve seen in our research in our kind of like world and like to see it translated to something that’s like wearable. Like I have a dress that I’ve made out of my like climate stripes and it’s like my favorite thing I own and I like wear it to climate events and whatever.
And it’s, you know, taking something that we usually see as like a digital object into the physical world is like inherently unique in like our space too. Same with those like Electrify Everything t-shirts. Like I’ve used emojis to like make them really playful and like talk about these things. So I just try to add a lot of like fun and creativity to topics that aren’t always like classified as that.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Let’s talk a little bit about your clothing line here because I saw you post recently on Twitter that a friend of yours had like in the wild seen somebody at the gym wearing one of your t-shirts.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: How does that make you feel? Like what’s the result of like, oh my God, there’s just this random person I have no connection to wearing a t-shirt with my art on it about climate change.
Nicole Kelner: I fully freaked out. I mean, it was like bonger. She texted me and she was like, hey, is this your shirt? And it was like my friend, like it was like her, someone that she saw working out at a rock climbing gym. And I was in shock. Yeah. So that was probably one of the coolest things. And that also happened with someone was at a conference at UPenn that I think was about like carbon removal. And they saw someone wearing my tote at the conference and sent me a photo of it.
And I think he had also bought the tote himself and they were wearing matching totes. Yeah. So that was the other time that was pretty darn wild.
Ross Kenyon: It seems like business is doing okay. People are buying prints of yours, either as art that is hanging or as clothing sounds like too. I see also that you can buy new emojis and stuff for Google Slides or slide decks, I guess I should say. Yeah.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah, I do like all these prints and merch, but I primarily do commissions. That’s like the main part of my day and how I support myself. I basically work with all sorts of climate startups, climate VCs, nonprofits, government organizations and help them like communicate something in their business that they want to be in my style. And I love it so much.
Ross Kenyon: Are you able to say which of these pieces are commissioned and which ones you just wanted to make? Is there any way that we could even tell looking at them here?
Nicole Kelner: These are all ones I wanted to make. But if you go up to the top, there’s a page that says commissions and a few that are public that I can talk about. And these are those ones. Collaborative Fund was one of my clients. They wanted a blog post about the materials that are inside of Tesla, so that was really fun to paint. Carbon Collective wanted their theory of change painted, so that was great and a really cool challenge to take their business model and concept and find a way to communicate it in a visual way.
And then Climate Tech BC wanted a piece for their newsletter about peat, which was really fun. And how peat is a great carbon sequester, which I’m sure you guys are quite familiar with.
Ross Kenyon: Some of these are like tonally, yeah, playful. The colors, watercolor is almost inherently calming. There’s also some humor in here too. I also know this one here, Siobhan, is at the very bottom. Oh, you’re on a different page than I am. I’m on your prints at the very bottom, the world’s on fire and says, yes, but what’s your web three strategy?
Asa Kamer: You found the one web three one.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s throwing some shade at blockchain.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah, that one. So both the GNOME one and the Web3 one were designed in response to tweets. So someone was like for the Web3 one, someone was like, someone should paint this or someone should make a graphic of this. And they like basically described a world that was like a mountain burning and like there’s droughts and a house is flooding. But there’s like people on top of a house that say like, yes, but what’s your Web3 strategy? And I was like, oh, how can I not paint this? So yeah. That is the result.
And same with the, like explain how a heat pump works. Like I’m a five year old, that was like a whole Twitter thread. And I saw one that got a lot of likes or whatever. And I was like, Ooh, that would be fun to paint. And I asked them for permission and painted that. So yeah, I see funny things on Twitter, make sure they’re like the person wants me to paint them and occasionally we’ll do things like that. If you guys ever want to collab on a meme, I’m down.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: You heard it here first. Lock her in. Let’s collab on a meme.
Asa Kamer: We can get whatever our top performing memes are in watercolor form.
Ross Kenyon: That’s an interesting idea. Which ones are we thinking about right now that might even fit well into this? Let’s take a risk and just do it. Oh, we might even have the most perfect one already here. I’m going to take over the screen share. What about even this one? This is like, have you ever painted a three-wolf moon or a two-wolf moon?
Nicole Kelner: No, I can’t say that I have.
Ross Kenyon: It says... Okay. If you’re listening, we’ll put up a link to it. It’ll probably be already published by the time you listen to this, but inside of you, there are two wolves, two wolves looking at each other in front of a full moon. One says this one supports CDR. The other one says, so does this one. I associate this so heavily with, I feel like, was it Charlie Kelly or Dwight Schrute who popularized the like dumb wolf t-shirt? I think Charlie has the horses, like the black horses. Dwight is three wolf moon.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I think it is right, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we’re also dabbling in classic art memes. So using kind of old classic art images and then throwing up some humorous modern text on them. Like I think one we did was the confessional and it was like a woman in the confessional and talking about how she likes to hum to like the sound of a DAC machine.
Asa Kamer: Oh yeah, yeah. In addition to actually painting the memes, we need to get one where it’s like a few of Nicole’s are like the formula for how to do something. And we need to get like how to make an awesome CDR meme and then like create like a formula as if there’s some like sophisticated way that we do this that can be like painted and put into an infographic. Just to really make ourselves look like smart and sophisticated.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah, I love that.
Ross Kenyon: You really want to mislead people in that way, Issa?
Asa Kamer: I just want to, you know, create a bit of a mystique.
Ross Kenyon: Have you seen these formats here? This is pretty watercolor gorgeous. We’re trying to figure out like what’s the correct way to do it. And then we got really, so it’s the, if you’re listening, stop glamorizing the grind and start glamorizing whatever this is. And it’s always someone, it’s like a hobbit in a hobbit hole or someone in a garden, like sipping tea. That’s what this picture is. And it’s nicely painted. And then we were wondering like, what if we could make it about the grind, like grinding up Minerals. And then we go into these weird, is this too meta?
Will only four people get this? How funny do those four people think this is? Does that compensate for its nicheness?
Asa Kamer: Another meta take that we should do is stop glamorizing the grind, start glamorizing whatever this is. And then it’s just like Nicole painting like a nice climate watercolor.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Oh, that is so meta. She can paint herself painting.
Ross Kenyon: There’s no irony. Yeah.
Nicole Kelner: This is like promotion.
Ross Kenyon: Get someone to take a nice photo of you painting and then we can make this and that can be a collab.
Nicole Kelner: That would be so funny.
Ross Kenyon: Good job, Asa. You’re pretty quiet there most of the time and then you swoop in like Batman with some good pitch like that. Whatever. Then we have a bunch of just like old memes like, could this be a thing? Okay, I feel like we’ve exhausted this over here. Well, whatever, we found one. We found like a fun one and it’s wholesome and it’s not a 19 levels of meta-ness in there.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Nicole, when does your book come out ostensibly or like would you have a timeline for that?
Nicole Kelner: Oh, that’s a great question. I am self publishing and figuring that out right now. And the main blockers with that are the book size that I want is a 10 by 10 inch book, which is larger than standard books because I want it to be a coffee table book and like feel good and like open it and be able to like read all my things because they’re pretty small. So not pretty much none of the regular like print on demand suppliers like Kindle or like there’s several that are the most popular for integrating with Amazon allow for that size.
So I found like potentially one supplier that I could work with and I’m hoping that works out. And my goal is to have Them ready to be bought by like mid-November so that they can be like holiday presents. So fingers crossed on that timeline. But yeah, it’s been really cool. I have them sitting right here and I’ve been, you know, it’s wild to have enough pieces of art to even consider making a book. I thought I wanted to like wait for a long time and like make sure I have The perfect ones and it would be super long and be like, just I don’t know, go the this needs to be the only thing I ever do kind of book.
But I come from a startup background and I’m like, OK, this will be like the first run and it doesn’t need to be perfect. Like, let me learn as much as I can, like, see how this feels like I could get a new one each year with like updated pieces and stuff. So, yeah, that’s where I’m at right now.
Ross Kenyon: Link is in the show notes too. I saw that if you want to buy, you have to send you a note or something like that. You have to like sign up on a special list. Is that right?
Nicole Kelner: I’m just taking pre-orders by like an email input form because I don’t want to take anyone’s money before they’re ready to be sold. So it’s just kind of like, do you want this and how many? Yeah. Reserve your spot now, people.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m going to literally do it right now. Why self-publish? What went into the reasoning there?
Nicole Kelner: I’m like the kind of person that when I have an idea, I make it happen. And I know regular publishing takes a long time and they take a lot of royalties and you have very little control. And once I make that one version, if I have any edits, I will not be able to fix that. So I have Been always curious about what the self-publishing route looks like. And if I, you know, get approached to do like a book deal down the road, then I wouldn’t be able to consider that in a different context.
But just wanted to start this way, see how it goes.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve been involved in book publishing in a previous career. Many times be like, all right, this will be published in 14 months from now. And you’re like, do you like the printers need to warm up or what? What takes that long? Printing the trees. It starts that far back in the cycle. This type of deployment seems built for another age. I’m wondering, I have seen authors that have issued formal relationships with publishers and just self-publishing. And it’s not just weird people at conferences who write cranky economic treaties anymore. Real people will self-publish.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah. I also learned that you can self-publish and then later work with a publisher. So I was like, this really doesn’t seem like a losing situation. Like I could just start and then I could get approached by an agent and like continue to publish if I wanted to. So I was like, why not? Let’s go.
Ross Kenyon: I feel like people will also like it being de-risks. So you took the first step, you tried it out, you tested the waters and it went well. Hopefully increase your Twitter account. That’s what authors need, right? I think authors just need a Twitter account at this point. I think that’s true. Like people want to take, they don’t want to take as big of a risk as some unpublished author. So I think this is probably a nice hybrid strategy. And it seems like you have a lot of support too. Like you already have people who, I don’t know how many people have already signed up for this, but I imagine it’s a sizable amount.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah. Yeah, it’s great. I have, I don’t know, several hundred pre-orders. It’s been wild.
Unknown speaker: Oh, that’s terrific.
Ross Kenyon: Several hundred. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. All around the world or is it all around the world?
Nicole Kelner: I have clients from all over. I have very few in New York. I’m based in New York and I have one client here or two right now. And I was like, wow, I get an in-person meeting. Whereas I had two clients in Australia within the past few months and I was like, this time zone is not the easiest to work with.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, that one will get you for sure.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Has anyone ever come at you and said that your artwork infantilizes climate change or makes a mockery of it or makes it too lighthearted? Have you ever received criticism like that?
Nicole Kelner: No.
Ross Kenyon: No? I’m surprised we have not in that way. I feel like we’re more vulnerable to that charge than potentially you are.
Asa Kamer: Ours are more immature, so I think we are more open to it.
Ross Kenyon: I think Nicole’s like the regular Winnie the Pooh and we’re like the tuxedo Winnie the Pooh. Okay.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: You had to use a meme analogy.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve gotten in trouble at work before. People have been like, is that just how you talk? Is it just references to ancient meme archaeology? We think the stuff that we do matters to some degree and helps make people laugh or communicate something in a new way. Have you had many experiences where you felt like you were making a difference or moving the needle in some sort of capacity, Nicole?
Nicole Kelner: Yeah, the smallest one that’s been like such a meaningful response from a piece that I did is a piece I did that was about composting and it was like a head of lettuce and showing that it takes like 25 years to decay in landfill. And I had someone message me that they started composting since they saw that piece.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Because of your piece, that gives you the warm and fuzzies. Oh, cool. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Everyone knows the hard part of composting, though, is knowing what to do with it once it’s once it’s in there. So you need to make a second piece about when do you take your compost out? Because I’m in that trap.
Nicole Kelner: I freeze my compost and drop it off every week.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, so you’re not. Well, you’re in an apartment. OK, but I have a yard. I’m like, how long do I leave this in here?
Nicole Kelner: Some of us don’t have that kind of luxury. I do have a different luxury that my compost drop is one block away right now.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Is it at the Duane Reade inside the Duane Reade?
Nicole Kelner: Definitely not. It’s like a farmer’s market a block away.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Is there like a genre of like that’s composting, but is there like a genre that you like to paint more or that’s easier to paint more than other genres of climate? Because, you know, you do everything from like decarbonization to carbon removal to recycling. What do you like to paint most?
Nicole Kelner: Oceans, any ocean based solutions are my favorite. Yeah, I my my personal favorite is like the one about whale and whale poop and carbon sequestration. And yeah, basically like the concept is like whale poop feeds phytoplankton and phytoplankton like sequester a ton of carbon. But I’ve always like loved the ocean growing up. I lived in Venice Beach for a year and was really involved with like Surfrider Foundation, did beach cleanup, stuff like that. And so like anytime I hear like ocean-based solutions, they kind of go to the top of my list.
Also just in general, like they’re my personal favorite, but they’re also like really beautiful to paint. And like, because of that, they’re more engaging, like, you know, blue, pretty ocean scapes are nice and soothing to see. And I think perform really well. So there’s winning all around for those ones.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely pretty and definitely cute. I’m looking at this whales plus carbon sequestration one. Yeah. I mean, that one I’ve seen just the other day, I heard someone saying, if you’re talking about whale poop and carbon removal, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I feel like I just heard that on a podcast and I was like, there was some pushback on like whales as, did you see that recently?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: There was some pushback about like our whales as carbon beneficial as we previously thought they were or something like that. Now I’m the evil scientist pushing back on you.
Nicole Kelner: You’ll have to send me it, although I don’t know if I want to know it.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a beautiful story. It’s like a little too perfect though, right?
Asa Kamer: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I hope it’s not. Every time I find out that some climate solution or carbon removal solution is much more difficult to measure or track or even to perform than we originally thought, there’s always a little bit of mourning. You’re like, ah, surely there’s some way we can figure this out, right? I think everyone’s so worried about that uncertainty being exploited in some nefarious way that the rush is always on to be like, don’t think about this at all. I don’t know. That’s just my vibe check of it. I don’t know if you agree with that, Siobhan.
Looks like you want to say something there.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: No, just plus one of that. I feel very similarly. And it happens all the time in CDR, right? Because we’re like the technology... Like readiness level is fairly low in some of these categories, it’s higher in others. And certainly like the robust MRV at scale isn’t happening yet. And so a lot of times as we explore these techniques more and more, we find out more and more and we find out, oh, like I remember there was that whole paper on kelp a while back and I was like, shit, is kelp not as good as we thought it was?
And so, of course, I want to read it. I don’t want to be an ostrich and stick my head in the sand. But then I’m like, man, I was like really excited about this. And, you know, you’re taking it down piece by piece. I’m still excited about kelp, but, you know, it’s nuanced. There’s a lot that goes into understanding these processes.
Asa Kamer: I think my favorite of your paintings are the infographic, like the actual graphs that you just paint. And I just think there’s something so like if you said like, you know, all these... Various like graphs and data visualizations that we read in like I mean many fields but in like climate field there’s a lot of that kind of thing and obviously they’re like generally very dry and you kind of just skim over it and get used to that and if you were like does that need to be sort of enhanced and turned into an artistic product I would be like well no like that’s nothing that’s like you know almost like a necessary evil to just like understand data but then to see it like I don’t know.
It really works like really clicks for me for some reason. And it almost like I don’t I don’t know if this is intentional, but it almost like creates this like secondary level of appreciation where it’s like you’re almost like not only displaying the information, but like validating the pursuit or validating like the career of like people who work in it and being like sort of adding this cultural element of like it’s like this recognition of like we have to see these things all the time and they’re not beautiful. But what if we like made one look nice?
I don’t know. There’s something about it that’s affirming for some reason. So I like those.
Nicole Kelner: Totally. I love that so much. That means a lot to hear. And that is exactly what I’m going for. We become desensitized by all the graphs that we’re looking at all the time. And they’re filled with information that’s so important. And people spend their lives sometimes to make a single graph. And that graph could be Like incredibly powerful, but it just gets like brushed over and like a giant report that is only looked at for a quick second. But when I am able to like make it shine, it makes me really happy that people will take more than a second to look at it.
I don’t know, there’s like a Reddit that’s like, what is it? Data is beautiful or something like that. And I just really have always felt that way. Like I love seeing numbers and data communicated in beautiful ways. And to add the element of like, this is actually art, like I am making like art out of graphs, like feels really fun to me.
Unknown speaker: Right on.
Ross Kenyon: How are you feeling about Mid Journey and Dolly and some of this AI generated art?
Nicole Kelner: Yeah. So I am starting to play with it a little actually. I have a friend who is, I don’t know if you’ve seen on Twitter, there’s like, show like the existing street as is with like a lot of like roads and traffics and like maybe one bike lane. And then like, that’s the before. And then there’s the after that’s like the idealistic, like Road generated by Dali. And like, so I’m working with a friend and we are doing like the before and then I’m going to paint the after and the after is like based off of like a Dali image that we generated.
So I’m like, I don’t know, this is kind of fun.
Asa Kamer: No, I was just going to say that’s so cool because I feel like the big like question right away after these things have kind of hit the last few months is like, well, is it actually art or what is art and does it devalue human art and I love that you’re just like using it as like a step to the final process. And then you’re putting your layer on top of it. And it’s like coming from this imagination. You’re just kind of going right around that question of like, well, is it this or is it that?
And just like, I’m going to like use it and we’re going to make something cool. Like, and that’s, I don’t know. It’s exciting. I’m interested to see like, cause I’ve played around with those things and I’m excited to see like actual, like creative artists, people like put that tool to use and like come up with some really cool stuff.
Ross Kenyon: Not just like immediately threatened by it. Right.
Nicole Kelner: I don’t know. I think of it like for this example, I’ll be using it as like my reference material, which is cool because like, you know, I spent a lot of time finding like the right reference materials and like, you know, maybe I can’t always find one that has like this character at this angle, like looking this way with this in the background. But like maybe Dolly could be like my way of helping Google that perfect thing that I’m trying to find. And then that’s my own reference material to adapt it.
So. I don’t know. We’ll see how I end up using it down the road. But that’s kind of what I’m thinking of it right now. And I come from like a tech background. Like it’s just a cool thing in general. Like I’m really excited that it exists and to play with.
Ross Kenyon: Some of those mid-journey ones I’ve seen have been just remarkably brilliant and so detailed. But I like the wabi-sabi just of you painting too. I like the fact there’s human imperfection and there’s like a wiggling. It feels organic in a way that I think It’s hard to replicate, but I’m probably going to eat my words in like 18 months.
Asa Kamer: So that’s probably exactly what’s going to happen.
Unknown speaker: I want to use it for memes that I want to do.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve done it a little bit and none of them really did well, but I wanted to make a joke of like, uh, I pitched one yesterday that was direct air capture as painted by Mark Rothko, but it’s just a normal Rothko painting of like the two colors. One of my art jokes like that are like, what are some other funny ones you could just plug in that would work?
Asa Kamer: Oh, Ross, I tried the same thing. And I was like, if we could, I was thinking like direct air capture as painted on like a, like classical painting of like a ship with like the big, you know, and I was like, that’d be it. But here’s the problem. What I learned is that mid-journey, their database for images goes up to 2019. And so in 2019, I don’t think the phrase direct their capture really conjured up much imagery on the internet. And I was like, that’s so interesting that there’s these little parameters on it still.
And one day it’ll be instantly searching all the internet’s images.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: You’re too cutting edge, Asa. I often say that.
Asa Kamer: And I was like, I was trying to do the same thing as you is like create funny historical locations of director capture. So we’ll have to wait for the technology to catch up to our imaginations on that one.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah. I’ve seen the ones that are like solar panels, like in the style of like XYZ artists. And I was like, wait, I love this so much. This is really cool.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I felt like a Monet solar panels. I think it’s pretty great.
Nicole Kelner: Yeah. Like, oh my God. Nerding out very hard right now.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. The art jokes are a plenty or just those weird syncretistic moments of combining those things. I’m wondering, I can’t want to do something like Simpsons related. I was thinking about, I just have an image of like Simpsons, Simpsons carbon removal. What about like the bad Simpsons drawing carbon removal? This might be too deep for the internet, for Asa might know. Siobhan, I think you’re too innocent in some of that weird stuff.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Ross Kenyon: Nicole, I don’t know your level of internet residency.
Nicole Kelner: I’m not a person’s person, sorry.
Ross Kenyon: Do I want that link in the show notes? Do people need to know about this? I’m not entirely sure. Asa says yes, okay. Well, we’re going to have links to all of your work if you want to follow you, if you want to buy your book, which they totally should, any of your artwork. Is there anything else we should talk about or you want to plug before we depart, Nicole?
Nicole Kelner: You can follow me on Twitter. I’m Nicole Kelner.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Follow her on Twitter and you can make some recommendations about what she could paint.
Nicole Kelner: Exactly. Yeah. I always love hearing ideas I want to paint or collaborate on.
Ross Kenyon: And if you send us, can you get someone to take a picture of you painting and then we could release the meme on the day the show comes out and then it can be kind of like a funny thing that we did.
Nicole Kelner: There’s a photo I was in the verb for like, and they did an article on me and they like came and like photographed me and there’s like some like very like moody photos of me painting.
Unknown speaker: Perfect.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great.
Nicole Kelner: So maybe you can crop me out of the light. The rest of the apartment and it’s just me like hunched over painting and like, cause she photographed it in my room dark and like used her like camera with like a flash. And I was like, this isn’t, I haven’t experienced this before, but some of the photos when they’re not edited, just look like me really having like a moment.
Ross Kenyon: Can you send us something? Send us, okay. Offline, but if you’re listening, you just thought you can get made live, which is fun. Asa and Siobhan, thanks for hanging as always.
Nicole Kelner: Thank you. Thanks for having me. So nice to talk.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks so much for listening. Give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Make some climate art. Pick up those old watercolors that are picking up dust in your garage, maybe. Make some weird AI art. Send it to us. And thanks so much for listening. Have a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people.
You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
