Team Lead: Kathleen Deck
Additional Team Members: Grecia Salazar (AGPM Undergraduate), Alex Jones (UCSC Natural Reserve Manager), Any DiLallo (Music Undergraduate), Frances Maurer (FDM Undergraduate)
Enviro-Envision is a project that 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 narrative of a changing Santa Cruz coastal redwood ecosystem. This project sought to compile and make complex information visually engaging and interactive, creating an opportunity for audiences to explore and connect with climate change content in anaccessible format. Enviro-Envision attempts to visualize the hard to see and forgotten aspects of human impact and climate change. By depicting a six-hundred-year span, the project seeks to bring to light the small and hard to discern, to the non-expert human eye, changes that are occurring all in an effort to educate and bring awareness to our local environment.
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.
Thank you 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. Enviro-Envision will next be featured at the Museum of Art and Historyin Santa Cruz in November. More information to come.
Interested in getting involved in further iterations of this project? Please contact Kathleen Deck.
Link to Website: startpointlab.wordpress.com