Research dispatch from the Venice Lagoon: getting lost in scale

What is a digital twin? In just under a month, you might be able to understand what it isn’t. It is not a simulation, it is not a model, it is not a world model…it is also a model. Perhaps a model that synchronizes disparate temporalities: property prices, tides, the speed of degradation of natural flood barriers. Perhaps it is a live model that you can use to run ‘what if’ scenarios. Perhaps, it will produce the infrastructure for a truly multinational European data policy, with money allocated fairly to each coastal region. Or, maybe, a digital twin is just the world’s most computationally intensive middleman. 

In ten years’ time, there will be a digital twin of one cubic meter of the Mediterranean Sea. With every piece of zooplankton, phytoplankton, a turtle, microplastic and dissolved mineral and their interactions accounted for. For once, valuable in its entirety. Perhaps.

The ocean is a mysterious other. But so is lobbying, and I am wondering if I—as a stakeholder—wouldn’t take more joy in seeing the micro- and macro-turbulences of capital fighting over that cubic meter than how turtles live and die there. Because, in the end, the non-human agents are not the decision makers, even though we might be downstream from their actions. Making a decision is not the same as having agency. 

Rendering the world’s many multimodal turbulences transparent and visible to the naked eye. Is that the aim? What does data transparency matter to me if a decision maker’s bad breakfast made him grumpy the day he decided to put a wind farm in a marine protected area? We should model decision makers’ emotions, perhaps. 

Can we do away with the idea that art needs to produce awe to inspire action? What is awe anyway? I am imagining theatre goers from the 17th century watching the automated water rise on a stage, the corkscrew mechanism and its silvery covers rendered hyperreal in the flickering light of candles; a cloud descending from the painted sky, metal thunder shaking the theatre. Everything is alive, and everything is moving. Maybe that’s sufficient for awe. I am told that scientists have proven that experiencing ‘awe’ generates climate-positive action. Elsewhere, it is said that visibility alone creates action. The ‘Earthrise’ photo, and the decades that followed, make that hard to believe. 

I am told by a neuroscientist who works at the intersection of science communication and art that counterfactuals work well. The example he gives is, curiously, not a counterfactual. It is a change in perspective: tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, but this time, you are the wolf.

Klara Kofen is TBA21–Academy’s 2026 Artist-in-residence in Venice, supported in this edition by the Tidal ArtS initiative.  A multidisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, film, sound, and writing, her practice is concerned with histories—speculative, counterfactual, real, and imagined—and the way technological interfaces shape our relation to time and affect. Her residency project, In Counterfactual Waters, explores the present, past, and future of the Venice lagoon’s many lives—as ecosystem, colonial archive, industrial body, and climate frontier—through the prism of the computational and epistemological affordances and limitations of the EU’s Digital Twin of the Ocean.