Planet Texas 2050 Reflections

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend both the BuildFest and the Monday symposium, so I attended the Symposium on Thursday: Environmental Arts & Humanities Faculty Learning Community Presentations. The most memorable part of this symposium was by Dr. Jiabao Li, an Assistant Professor of Design, who shared her experience on cleaning the glaciers in the Arctic Ocean. Her journey was motivated by global warming and its effect on sea level rising, which induced the ongoing project of refreezing the Arctic Ocean to slow down the ice from melting. She shared a few videos of her cleaning the glaciers as well as her interactions with the sea creatures with self-made speaker that generates cries imitating the polar bears.

• 🌊˖°𓇼⋆🐋🐚 𓈒𓏸 ...

• 🌊˖°𓇼⋆🐋🐚 𓈒𓏸 ...

On her journey to the Arctic, she shared a story about the younger boys playing “World Cup: The Arctic Version,” in which they substituted a soccer ball with ice. With this eco-friendly entertainment form without the need for a plastic ball potentially damaging to the environment, the boys were having as much if not more fun as regular soccer, which inspired me to think about alternative ways to perform daily activities in a more environmentally conscious and productive way.

In her conclusion, she shared with us the exhibition of her work in Roppongi, Tokyo. It was very entertaining as her work seemed very similar to ours in that some of the displays were in Haiku form to communicate the urgency of global warming consciousness as well as the beauty of the Arctic, a not so commonly explored side of the Earth. Her other displays were often immersive as well, with a self-invented machine that captures the auditory experience of the seals’ cries. Some were creative and innovative, with one capturing my attention the most. She had a display with a plastic bag that was engineered to produce the sounds of the ocean, and I thought this was correlating to our activity with trash collecting and projectile mapping.