Planet Texas + Haptics Experience Reflections - Yuki Pilon
After participating in the Planet Texas Symposium, please write and share videos/photos reflecting on your experience. Explore the potential of this type of experience with our Haiku Horizons immersive experience.
Over the course of last week, I was able to attend three of the Planet Texas 2050 events at the WCP. The three events I attended were all very unique in nature, and each opened my eyes to a new way in which artists, students, teachers, and community members can contribute to the collective fight against climate change. All of the presentations I attended had a through line—education. It was made overwhelmingly clear that climate and environmental education is essential in pursuing a greener future. Now, I’ll go into a brief description of the three experiences I attended:
Collaborating for Climate Change: A Roundtable Discussion Between Artists and Scientists (WCP Ballroom)
This roundtable discussion featured a panel of excellent speakers, all coming from different spaces within the sustainability scene. The four specific areas represented were art, education, infrastructure, and indigenous studies. One such speaker was our very own Professor Kate Freer! At this event, I had the opportunity to learn about how artists can connect, collaborate, and conspire for a more positive climate future in Austin and beyond. The session introduced the concept of Creative Collaborations in our approach to climate resilience through the arts, considered a selection of current efforts to use the arts to collaborate for change, and then gave me the opportunity to collaborate with other panel attendees to dream up future possibilities for change. Within the four areas, I learned the following:
Infrastructure partnerships refers to learning from existing models of disaster prep and response to consider our role in the wider climate change movement in a practical and actionable way. This includes protest performance and overlaps in infrastructure with other specialties, departments and disciplines.
Educational partnerships include long-term partnerships in K-12 education to partner with teachers and students to improve the learning structures in spaces. This addresses how we bring conversations of educational and climate equity in every local space.
Scientist + Artist Partnerships includes expanding approaches to the American Arts; working with scientists in a way that doesn’t just instrumentalize the art. This seeks to answer the question of how can we work together with scientists rather than just in service of them, as these are problems that none of our disciplines can solve alone.
Indigenous Knowledge Partnerships include production, youth engagement and educational work. These bring liberation between all living things and highlight the fact that indigenous knowledge of how to care for the Earth has always been there, and the sciences are just now realizing that they have value.
Planting the Seed: Critically Reading Children's Literature (James Turrell Sky Space)
The second event I had the opportunity to attend was a dramatic reading of the Lorax in the James Turrell Sky Space. The educator who hosted this reading was a professor at Austin Community College, and delved into a history of the book before performing a dramatic reading of the well-known children’s book. To give a brief overview, Dr. Seuss's The Lorax, is a children's book that serves as an ecological fable. It tells the story of the Lorax, a character who "speaks for the trees," and his confrontation with the Once-ler, whose industrial activities lead to environmental destruction. The book was inspired by Dr. Seuss's concerns about environmental degradation and was his way of addressing these issues in an engaging and accessible manner. Silent Spring, written by Rachel Carson and published in 1962, is a groundbreaking work that exposed the harmful effects of pesticides like DDT on the environment. It played a pivotal role in raising awareness about ecological issues and sparked the modern environmental movement. Both works share a common theme: the urgent need to protect the environment from human exploitation. While Silent Spring uses scientific evidence to highlight the dangers of chemical pesticides, The Lorax employs storytelling to emphasize the consequences of unchecked industrialization. Together, they underscore the importance of environmental stewardship and inspired greater public consciousness about ecological preservation.
Through this dramatic reading, myself and the other attendees were able to connect to a work we were familiar with in childhood. We were challenged to interact with it in a way that considered the inspiration of the book within the climate activism movement, and shared a common takeaway of the importance of the youth in being able to make progress in the fight against climate change. It was an incredibly moving experience, and ultimately left each attendee more aware of the gravity of our role, as the youth of this Earth, in making a change for our environment.
Creating Constellations of Change with Students and Teachers: The Climate Resilience with Youth Project at Ann Richards School (WCP Legislative Assembly Room)
The final event I had the pleasure of attending was a presentation by the students of Ann Richard School on their latest collaboration with UT in bringing climate education to Austin public education. In the presentation, the students chronicled their journey of putting on the Action Through the Arts: Creating Constellations of Change festival, which was the culmination of a semester-long research project with arts-based climate resilience projects with the 7th grade class sharing their discoveries. The festival was led through the work of a Student/Teacher Learning Community (STLC) with middle and high school students who initiated the idea for the 7th grade curriculum enhancement during the summer. The STLC wanted to create a festival that inspired a fusion of arts and environmental education to foster a more resilient climate future. Through these bright young students’ presentation, I was able to learn about the project and the students’ reflections on the emotional and cognitive outcomes from their work over a semester together, exploring aspects of resiliency, belonging and climate change literacy in schools.
These experiences inspired my work within the Haiku Horizons cohort by illustrating to me the art of resilience, in every form. These sessions taught me that the climate crisis transcends our ability to imagine its consequences, and that the arts are a language with multimodal efficacy. As such, artist’s methods broaden possibilities, are non-reductive, and can attend to both humanistic and natural concerns. Within Haiku Horizons, I believe we can focus on the educational aspect of each of these sessions and consider the existing sources of knowledge we can pull from, including local schools in Texas and Tokyo, as well as the existing haiku literature pointing to valuable climate lessons.
After participating in either the Social Impact BuildFest or Visiting TXI lab haptics room, please write and share videos/photos reflecting on your experience. Share what you've learned about haptics and storytelling and explore the potential of this type of experience with our Haiku Horizons immersive experience.
In addition to attending the Planet Texas 2050 events last week, I also had the opportunity to spend half an hour in the TXI lab haptics room, where I participated in a passive haptics experience being test-played for SXSW. I became much more familiar with the concept of haptics, what haptics equipment looks like, and the power of haptics in creating an immersive experience for participants. The experience included a full suit-up, in which I dawned:
A Haptics Vest
Liner Gloves
Haptics Gloves
Haptics Armbands
A VR Headset
Handheld Remotes
After suiting up in the equipment, I was sat in a chair and then the experience was started for me. I very quickly found myself deeply immersed into the haptics experience. I was a bit shocked at the fact that there was no disclaimer to the experience, as it addressed some very emotionally and mentally heavy topics. The entire experience was the story of an individual’s experience going through the practice of conversion therapy, and quite literally puts the participant into the seat of the individual being ‘converted’. I think there might have been a lapse in communication, as these were very sensitive topics and should have included some form of informed consent before subjecting the participant (me) to the experience. Regardless, it was an undeniably impactful form of storytelling and absolutely got its message across. Having experienced haptics firsthand, I now believe there are many ways in which Haiku Horizons could include haptics technology into our immersive educational exhibitions. Whether that is allowing people to feel the tremors of natural disasters, creating a 3-D space in which collective waste can be visualized, or even minor haptics associated with certain interactive props, I believe haptics technology could work to ensure the audience of our exhibition is fully immersed into their educational experience. By bridging the mental concepts with physical sensations, haptics surely provides an opportunity to leave audiences moved by our educational exhibits in every sense.
