Spark Lecture - Timothy Nohe & Charles Ichoku

Join us for a poignant lecture from Timothy Nohe and Charles Ichoku, There's no fire season; it's fire year, as part of Spark VII: Industrial Afterglow.

As wildfires grow more frequent, more destructive, and more entwined with human settlements, the boundaries between natural disaster and human infrastructure are dissolving. In this public conversation and lecture, climate scientist Dr. Charles Ichoku and interdisciplinary artist Timothy Nohe explore the new era of fire year, where traditional “fire seasons” could collapse especially in regions that are becoming drier into a continuous, climate-fueled threat.

Timothy Nohe, artist and educator, turns his attention to that threshold. Through kinetic sculpture, light, and sound, Nohe investigates fire as both ecological force and social metaphor, asking how we live, remember, and create in a world increasingly shaped by combustion and collapse. His Fire Year, featured in the Industrial Afterglow exhibition, offers a visceral and deeply personal glimpse into fire-driven futures, a perspective informed by his daughter's 2024 evacuation from UCLA due to the Los Angeles fires.

Dr. Ichoku, Director of the GESTAR-II Consortium and a leading researcher working with NASA on global wildfire emissions, brings a planetary perspective: monitoring and modeling fire dynamics from space and airborne platforms. His work captures fire’s massive scales, how it affects the atmosphere, carbon cycles, and climate systems. But it’s at the human interface —where wildland blazes meet urban edges or direct plumes of smoke in continent-spanning whirls — that these planetary patterns hit home.

Together, Ichoku and Nohe will discuss how scientists and artists can collaborate to understand and respond to climate breakdown—not just by charting data or producing images, but by building shared vocabularies of urgency, memory, and repair