Abstract How can artistic research produce genuinely new knowledge about environmental threats that are structurally invisible and scientifically complex? Plastic Magnitudes, a transdisciplinary art-science collaboration with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, demonstrates how integrating socially engaged art (SEA) with transdisciplinary research (TDR) addresses plastic particulates (micro-/nanoplastics) — threats that elude human perception and public engagement.
Plastic Magnitudes integrates TDR (co-design, co-production, co-implementation) with SEA (community engagement, facilitated dialogue, art-making) across three activities: beach clean-ups, community sculpture workshops using collected marine debris, and an immersive projection-mapped installation merging community-made forms with JRC scientific documentation. Each provides material tangibility, emotional immediacy, and visible local solutions for plastic particulats, advancing participants through a five-stage framework: awareness, emotional connection, perceived agency, visible efficacy, and sustained action.
Their integration generates material-affective accessibility: the conditions under which invisible threats become personally actionable. The work demonstrates that artistic research's unique capacity lies in producing knowledge that is simultaneously epistemically rigorous, emotionally resonant, and politically generative.
By creating conditions where policy-driven research is experienced rather than read, the work transformed affect across three constituencies: scientists processing paralysis, citizens moving from isolation to agency, and policymakers unmoved by reports until aesthetic encounter made contamination felt. Plastic Magnitudes demonstrates that artistic research can function as preventive political infrastructure, generating the collective capacity for action that governance requires but information transfer alone cannot produce.