With CITRIS support, the UC Santa Cruz professor unites art, ecology and technology in multifaceted, multisensory installations that aim to encourage public engagement with climate and sustainability.
High on the cliffs of the California coast, stationed in front of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center in Santa Cruz, a silver cloud floats over a misty landscape.
Unlike its brethren, this cumulonimbus is crafted of aluminum and copper. It intercepts water-bearing fog, which beads into larger droplets on a fine mesh before finally condensing into a stream of water that washes down to nourish the soil below. Called Gathering Cloud, the sculpture was designed by artist Anja Ulfeldt for the Art+Fog Collective.
The multifaceted nature of this project — public artwork and science exhibition, functional instrument and instructional tool — is the hallmark of Jennifer Parker, one of Art+Fog’s leaders, a professor of art and new media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a principal investigator (PI) at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS).
As both artist and educator, Parker strives to engage the creative and the scientific realms, using artistic expression to motivate meaningful inquiry into the world around us. Her distinctive, multisensory work highlights interconnectedness, from collages that magnify the role of microorganisms in the cosmos to soundscapes that use feedback from human movements to compute musical compositions.
An alumna of UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies, Parker was inspired to explore the intersection of contrasting disciplines early in her career. Her undergraduate art education focused on systems thinking — a holistic approach to problem-solving that considers the interdependencies of a complex context — and allowed her to investigate scientific fields, such as biology and ecology, through creative output in addition to traditional analysis.
After receiving a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Rutgers University, Parker exhibited her work in galleries and museums for several years before joining the UC Santa Cruz faculty in 1999. One of her first priorities as a professor was to provide her students with the same interdisciplinary learning opportunities she had enjoyed.
“At that time, we didn’t have the environmental art and social practice MFA program yet,” said Parker. “So I thought, ‘How can we engage the undergraduates to start thinking about the intersections of disciplines and not be so siloed?’”
Motivated by a student pursuing a double major in physics and art, Parker teamed up with theoretical astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz to found the UC Santa Cruz OpenLab Collaborative Research Center, a community space for multidimensional exploration, in 2010. The center has since been home to projects spanning astronomy, ocean health and ecology, and genomics, while championing creative research and learning practices on campus.
Harnessing interdisciplinary power
Parker’s foray into fog began with an encounter with Peter Weiss, an atmospheric chemist in the UC Santa Cruz microbiology and environmental toxicology department. Weiss, who has studied the substance since 2010, initially sought to trace the origin of large quantities of mercury found in the soil on the campus farm, and he found the answer in the region’s ever-present curtains of fog.
Fog is a familiar presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. It provides crucial moisture to towering coastal redwoods and co-stars in many a tourist’s Golden Gate Bridge selfie. As Weiss demonstrated, it can serve as an important indicator of environmental contamination — and he also sees in it great potential to serve as a water source for individual homes.
While fog’s fickle behavior makes it difficult to harvest water in large amounts, it could prove particularly useful for small household uses, such as sustaining gardens, in times when every drop of water counts. Fog catchers, or fog collectors, are an ancient technology, used by Indigenous people in the Canary Islands more than 2,500 years ago.
Weiss envisioned a modern-day California revival, with a network of fog catchers popping up in backyards around the region, helping to grow a body of knowledge on the phenomenon’s seasonal and geographic patterns through citizen-powered science. How, then, could he convince community members to join the experiment?
Enter Parker, armed with a vision to connect the coastal community to Weiss’s work.
Supported by a 2024 Interdisciplinary Innovation Program (I2P) Award from CITRIS at UC Santa Cruz, she and Weiss launched the Art+Fog Collective and collaborated with OpenLab artist-in-resident Ulfeldt to build an exhibit featuring Ulfeldt’s outdoor public artwork at the Seymour Center, which saw over 70,000 visitors just last year.
Their installation strikes a balance between art and utility, with its dramatic cloud catcher aiming to spark viewers’ interest — and investment — in this sustainable solution.
Augmenting reality, explaining sustainability
Combining a low-tech fog catcher with advanced augmented reality (AR), Parker aims to reveal the science and more-than-human relationships within the work, inviting viewers to see fog collection as reciprocal, rather than solely extractive for human use. Using 3D scans of specimens from the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History collection, an interactive virtual experience inside the Seymour Center will allow visiting families to see, albeit virtually, the variety of local animals that depend on fog water as part of our shared ecosystem.
Beyond offering visitors a way to learn about the science of fog, the project also invited UC Santa Cruz students to transform research into public storytelling, connecting atmospheric science to the lives of plants, animals and people who depend on it. This past summer, Parker recruited two interns from the CITRIS Workforce Innovation Program to assist in building the virtual environment, tasking them with scanning specimens, rigging the 3D models for animation, and storyboarding the AR experience.
“A big part of sustainability is getting the word out there about alternative solutions,” said Catie Bronte, a fourth-year undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. “So figuring out how to explain fog catching to people in an engaging way has been a valuable lesson.”
The interns found a supportive teacher in Parker.
“She’s helped us gauge our personal interests within the project and learn where we can grow from there, making sure our structured work is balanced by creative freedom,” said Brandon Wong, who recently graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in molecular, cell and developmental biology.
A seasoned mentor of undergraduates and graduates alike, Parker has welcomed CITRIS Workforce Innovation interns into the OpenLab since 2022, the program’s very first year. She appreciates the unique perspective that each student brings and treasures the opportunity for mutual growth.
“Hosting a CITRIS intern is like walking a familiar trail with someone seeing it for the first time,” explains Parker. “It’s a great exchange — each of us offering what we know, each of us learning something unexpected in return. It’s exciting to see students push themselves and show up to make something new and inspiring.”
Cultivating agents of change
Through her work with the Art+Fog Collective and the OpenLab, Parker draws attention to the ways in which societal needs and formal research practice deeply affect one another, and how demonstrating this relationship through art can empower people to be individual drivers of sustainability.
Parker and Weiss are now jumping from education to action by developing a do-it-yourself kit for Bay Area residents to install fog catchers in their own garden beds. The more sites with fog collectors, the more data that the team will have on fog migration patterns and what nutrients (and contaminants) the water may contain.
Weiss and his students are equipping the DIY devices, as well as several already disbursed fog harvesters, with water collection sensors that will provide real-time data. He believes continued support will help overcome current challenges in the field, such as knowing which locations have consistently high yields.
“The sky’s the limit. If you build something new in this space, people will take notice of it,” said Weiss. “The interest from the public is there, so we just have to keep working on it, and it will happen.”
And much like a fog catcher relies on every precious drop to produce a meaningful amount of water, each individual effort within a project counts toward its success. Parker believes a multifront approach is crucial to changing perspectives and convincing people to take action in response to climate change.
“What happens when we start to create this public art that also has utility? We push people to really think about their own use of water,” she said. “And when we do that, we inspire them to be agents of change.”
Credits for in-set photos in order of appearance: Gathering Cloud public art project at the Seymour Center by Anja Ulfeldt; portrait of Parker by Saul Villegas; portrait of Weiss and Parker by Anja Ulfeldt; fog water sample collection by Anja Ulfeldt; Art+Fog Collective exhibit at the Seymour Marine Center (May–September 2025) by Jennifer Parker; team working on AR 3D scanning and animations in OpenLab by Saul Villegas; AR huron walking inside the Seymour Marine Center by Jennifer Parker; Parker and CITRIS intern team outside the Digital Arts Research Center at UC Santa Cruz by Saul Villegas; undergraduate art major Arlo Reilly with fog catcher garden bed designed by Peter Weiss by Saul Villegas.