WEDNESDAY
1 April 2026
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm (Berkeley Time)
Hearst Memorial Mining Building 390
Based on historical data, predictive models such as the Kalman filter draw a cone of probable futures. But beyond ±3σ lie anomalies—floods, droughts, social ruptures, state changes—that statistics alone cannot contain. Imagination allows individuals and communities to inhabit these long tails together. It makes visible what the data implies but does not show, and enables the rehearsal of futures that differ from the past. Perhaps imagination is always social: a shared capacity to extend attention and care into futures the data alone cannot hold.
As a data artist, Greg Niemeyer looks at numbers and asks whom they represent. A flow rate from the Sacramento River is never just cubic meters per second; it is a circulation from snowflake to ocean wave, sustaining soils, salmon, forests, farm fields, and cities along the way. Where the data ends, imagination begins. Viewers are invited to fill in what was not measured: the lives that generated the signal, the when and where of its witnessing.
Niemeyer will share recent projects developed through extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration. He will discuss work with Dr. Chelle Gentemann and Aria Mondragon using NASA precipitation records to render rain anomalies visible and audible, revealing patterns of extraction and change. Using USGS river discharge data, he composes the many “voices” of rivers across the year, translating hydrologic variation into sound and light. With Synchronicity on Salesforce Tower, environmental data becomes a public architectural experience: circulation at a metropolitan scale. Finally, Niemeyer will preview new work by singer, songwriter, and artist Jewel on the Pleiades and the Atlantic Ocean, which Niemeyer helped develop over the past two years.
With all these projects, Niemeyer hopes to support the social function of data, the potential to step into deeper relationships with the things we don't fully understand and we don't know yet.
