Enviro-Envision
Enviro-Envision uses data, research, and future scenarios to create visually accurate digital paintings navigated by gallery visitors in an interactive installation. To provoke thought and audience engagement, it offers a non-linear narrative of a changing Santa Cruz coastal redwood ecosystem. Visually and holistically, Enviro-Envision seeks to show the complex interactions that happen within an ecosystem and the effects of human-induced climate change on local environments.
For this project, I created three paintings, using a combination of digital photography and paint and traditional painting techniques, to create a environment scene that would reflect the past, present, and future of a Santa Cruz Coastal Redwood ecosystem. With the help of Alex Jones, the UCSC Campus Natural Reserve Manager, I collaborated with UCSC scientists’ in using their knowledge, research, and data collected in the reserve to inform the paintings. Additionally, I created an interactive projection, coded with Processing, in which the audience will be able to navigate among and interact with the three different paintings.
At the Receivership Exhibition, that opened on April 27th at the Digital Arts Research Center at UC Santa Cruz, the program was projected onto a sixteen-foot by nine-foot screen and included a trackpad on a pedestal for audience interaction. The huge screen provided a close to life scale experience and added drama to the depictions. Within the interactive projection there was a timeline, showing the past (1500), present (2019), and future (2100) with the dates placed at the bottom center of the corresponding images. By hovering and moving over the timeline with a trackpad, the three different depictions images would fade transparency into the other as the user moved horizontally over the timeline, allowing the user to see one time frame at a time. On top of these images there were four overlaid graphs. Each graph represented a different set of data, with the first showing a decline in biodiversity, the second a rise in temperature, the third shows a rise in carbon dioxide parts per million, and the fourth depicted the intervals and intensity of fire in the area. Each overlaid graph, showed a divergence in the future, portraying the uncertainty of the future, with one showing RCP 2.6 and the other RCP 8.5. RCP, mentioned above, are representative concentration pathways, which are greenhouse gas concentration trajectories that are used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Each graph had its own story, so as the audience moved the mouse from the past to the present (from left to right), they could hear all four stories. The viewer is encouraged to explore different areas of interest inside the painting, which by hovering over the ellipses that correlate to the graphs, information, in a mix of visual, text, and audio format, about what the viewer is hovering over, appears. There was a minimum of five ellipses that are specific to each graph, encouraging the audience to explore all points. This information forms a narrative about the ecosystem and how it has and will continue to be impacted.
With new media art projects such as this, the audience can see, visually, collapsed timescales, species patterns, and human influence, which consequently has the potential to provide an emotional connection and a collective understanding of local environmental health. When individuals can visualize their futures there is hope that massive action will be demanded and that change will be instigated from within communities. This project has the potential to change how we comprehend global phenomena, such as climate change, making it easier to understand and mitigate on a local level.
Thanks to the support from the Norris Center Art and Science Residency Program, Florence French Scholarship, and IDEA Hub.
This project was displayed at the Sixth Annual Climate Change Conference in Santa Cruz. It was also displayed at the 2019 MFA show, at the Digital Arts Research Center at UC Santa Cruz from April 26th-May 12th. The project thesis research paper was one of the top-ranked thesis abstracts of 2019 by The Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS). Enviro-Envision was also featured at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz in November 2019 and at the HubX Open House in February 2020.
Interested in getting involved in further iterations of this project? Please contact Kathleen Deck here.