Collaboration with Ocean Community Festival 2025

On June 26th, ACTNOW collaborated in the interdisciplinary webinar Ocean Community Festival 2025, organized by TBA-21 (Ocean Archive) with the panel Immersive Data, Ecosystem Modelling & Spatial Representations: Making the Intangible Visible and Emotionally Perceptible.

Through a conversation between software engineer and modeller Jeroen Steenbeek (ACTNOW partner), we will delve into visual modeling and ecosystem simulations serve not only to inform policy, but to activate emotion, imagination, and shared responsibility.

As marine ecosystems face accelerating pressures, it becomes urgent to develop new aesthetic and technological tools that allow us to feel the ocean as much as we understand it. This session explores how ecological modelling and immersive data visualisation can make visible the hidden dynamics of marine life: its flows, tensions, and interdependencies, offering not only scientific insight but emotional resonance. Jeroen Steenbeek will not only introduce the principles behind Ecopath with Ecosim, but also share his vision for creating more inclusive, legible, and emotionally engaging visual interfaces. By situating ecosystem modelling within a broader ArtScience dialogue, this talk proposes that digital tools are not only analytical instruments but also poetic ones—capable of generating new works of visual storytelling that foster empathy, imagination, and care for the ocean’s invisible worlds.

The event was organized by Nuria Bofarull (Communications Officer ACTNOW, NIOZ)