Visualizing Climate Change
exhibition November 16–23, 2015 The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design
Visualizing Climate Change Summer Challenge Fellowship exhibition
The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design November 16–23, 2015 Opening Reception Novemeber 16 | 7pm 7th Floor lobby Free and open to the public
Sustainability, living in harmony with the natural processes of the planet, is the central challenge of the twenty first century. No part of that challenge is more pivotal than addressing climate change, the alteration of earth’s climate dynamics. In order for climate change to be effectively addressed, clear and poignant communication needs to be utilized to promote an understanding of the issues in a way that is expressive through means not limited to a strictly scientific discourse. As part of these efforts, The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design (CUISD) sponsors a student fellowship program to support students in their pursuit of scientific and visual research on a chosen issue of climate change. This year’s fellowship displays the student fellows’ work, as well as the work of contributing artist, Melissa Fleming, and the work of The CUISD. Each project investigates a specific phenomenon related to climate change, rooted in a distinct locale, and its effects on geography, economics, security, and/or social stability. In doing so, emphasis rests upon clear and creative modes of visual communication. Each project seeks to conflate the bounds of science, art, architecture and engineering in order to provide fresh insight, expression and understanding around these issues.
Landscapes of Erosion: Kern County and the California Drought Katherine Sullivan AR’18 | Margaux Wheelock-Shew AR’18 Humanity has ruptured the delineation between the geologic and anthropogenic. Within the earth exist zones where sedimentary layers of human-made deposits intermingle with geologically formed strata, zones where oil is cleaved from parched rock, where mechanical pumps inject steam and acid to compress, impact, and fracture shale. In visualizing the boundaries of the Anthropocene, and of “nature,” we must come to acknowledge the near-impossibility of identifying geologic shifts as exclusively “natural,” in contrast to human-made. The two are very enmeshed. Yet, it can be said that soil erosion is accelerated by human activity in various ways, and at a pace that cannot be sustained. The correlations between soil erosion and oil extraction, agriculture, drought, warming, and water—or lack thereof— are revealed through the aggregation of data as well as in the landscape. Our project has been parsing data in order to locate such confluent forces at play in Kern County, California. The scale of interest has ranged from the immediate and granular yet amorphous soils, to the incomprehensible reverberations of the Quaternary era’s fault shifts and consequent geomorphologic transformations. California has long experienced recurring cycles of drought, but it is certain that this is the worst in its recorded history. The phenomenon can be attributed to a fluke atmospheric ridge preventing rainfall, but it can also be perceived as latently linked to human actions, most of which might never be disentangled or revealed. In our tendency to identify nature as a whole, balanced entity, we construct a boundary between it and us, perpetuating an ideology that has long served as a foundation for the ways in which we exploit the earth. Our need to define and delineate our impact within environmental catastrophes such as this drought (or other ecological events) stems from this impulse to separate out the “natural” from the “human-made.” But it is muddier than that in this era of the Anthropocene. We must learn to contend with this muddiness, in order to move past our default state of paralysis and pacification when confronted with such complex ecological crises.
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Indeed, it is worth telling the (his)story of a small, local, singular element, that of an atom, a grain of sand, a thin layer of fluid somewhere in the middle of this violent zone where various flows intermingle. Michel Serres
Hydrology Kern County, California
Sedimentary Deposits and Groundwater Depths Alluvial Fan, Kern County, California
Map of Current Farms Kern County, California
Farm Loss Bakersfield, Kern County, California
Oil Extraction and Waste Removal Elk Hills, Kern County, California
Stitching Communication: Conflating the Languages of Bangladesh’s Climate Change Claire Calvert A’18 | Mizanur Rahman ENG’18 Bangladeshi people feel the affects of climate change in many ways throughout the country. Coastal lands are harshly affected by more frequent storms and severe floods that endanger people, destroy homes, and engulf land. Because of the seawater flooding, the land becomes too salinized to grow crops and farmers are unable to make a living from agriculture. Although people try to prevent and cope with the flooding by building embankments, the strategies and materials used to build these structures bear weak results and require too much maintenance. In our project, we study the environmental, social, and economical impacts of climate change on Bangladesh, specifically the effects of rising sea levels and flooding. To support their families and escape the devastation of the coastal land, many Bengalis, often young women, move to the city slums to work in the industry that is keeping Bangladesh afloat: the ready-made garment sector. In general, factory work is dangerous, does not pay well, and fails to foster a positive work atmosphere. However, it does allow some women the chance to avoid early marriage and childbearing. Although textile factories support the country when agriculture no longer can, they pollute the environment, due to lack of regulation and hazardous waste disposal practices, creating a feedback loop of environmental damage. Many people working in the industry sew Western clothing, which they cannot typically identify with. Textiles that Bengalis are able to identify with are nakshi kanthas; traditional Bengali embroidered quilts, often crafted from old sarees and made as a leisure activity. Nakshi kanthas are often used as an archive for community lore. For our project, we’ve employed the nakshi kantha as a platform for learning, sharing, and communicating our research findings. Similar to how a Bengali person may use the fabric of an old saree to make a kantha, we used a foundation fabric printed with images that show the typical American exposure to Bangladesh. On this foundation fabric we embroidered specific symbols that illustrate the effects of climate change in Bangladesh, layering on our climate change data in the fashion of traditional nakshi kantha Bengali aesthetic.
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It is vital for us to acknowledge that every research venture begins with a pre-existing foundation of knowledge. Ours, as a white, American woman and a Bengali born, but partially American raised man, drastically differ from each other and represent the two cultures that we attempt to unify in conversation. The five quilts we have produced, and the book of designs that accompanies them, act as an exchange of culture–our homage to the Bengali people who very well could have sewn the clothing that we wear everyday. These quilts are imprinted with our findings about the Bengali experience of climate change and attempt to communicate Western understandings of climate change, filtered through Bengali visual aesthetics.
Flooding
Factory Danger
Embankments
Storm Severity
Taka Coin “Made in Bangladesh”
Windows to Warming
Catherine Go ENG’16 | Aman Grewal ENG’16 | Jaesung Song ENG’16 The changes in climate that have been observed in the last several decades brings us to the unequivocal fact that global warming is very real and has very real consequences. Aman Grewal (ME ’16), Jaesung Song (CE ’15) and Catherine Go (ME ’16) team up in the attempt to build a comprehensive visualization of the effects of climate change. Utilizing Unity software as well as data sets collected from NASA records from the past several years, changes in different variables are mapped across the globe. By studying snow cover, carbon monoxide content in the atmosphere, vegetation concentrations, wildfires, and temperature anomalies year-by-year, they hope to demonstrate the transformation of the Earth as a derivative of the steady climb in the Earth’s overall temperature.
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Visualizing Climate Change | CUISD
Temperature Anomalies, 2000
Snow Cover, 2000
Vegetation, 2000
Temperature Anomalies, 2015
The CUISD Glacier Folio Project
The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design Recognizing that the dramatic loss of glacial land-ice is rapidly increasing and that this loss greatly affects environmental and social ecosystems, this project seeks to document in an accessible, graphic format the changes now occurring to some of the iconic glaciers of earth. The Glacier Folio Project looked at a wide variety of representational strategies that are now used for recording ice field conditions, and set out to develop a clear, uniform cartography method that presents an accessible and visually compelling tool for communicating this ice loss. Using line denotation, the drawings orient the diminishing size of the glaciers throughout the past century by overlaying data sets to form one comprehensive image. As a pilot project, the CUISD selected eight examples including glaciers from mid-latitude Europe, mid and upper latitude sites in North America, and equatorial glaciers in South America. The case study glaciers were selected for their importance to society–as water supplies–and for the clarity of change that has been recorded over an extended period of time. The Glacier Folio Project envisions cataloguing one hundred key glaciers, a resource that will be made available in an on-line Cooper Union archive and ultimately through the production of a fine art lithographic folio. Future areas of study will include Himalayan glaciers, Patagonian Glaciers and the key ice field of equatorial Africa.
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Visualizing Climate Change | CUISD
American Glaciers
Melissa Fleming Artist Melting glaciers are one of the most visible manifestations of climate change. Essentially massive rivers of ice, they are particularly sensitive to rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns. For centuries, glaciers around the world have advanced and retreated in response to localized conditions. Today, as our average global temperature increases, the vast majority are in retreat. Focused on the US, where there are more than one thousand officially named glaciers and many more un-named, the images in this ongoing series explore how climate change is impacting glaciers in our own backyard.
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Visualizing Climate Change | CUISD
Melissa Fleming, Byron Glacier
Melissa Fleming, Glacial Toe
Fellowship Recipients
Curators and Fellowship Advisors
Claire Calvert The School of Art
The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design Professor Kevin Bone Director
Catherine Go Aman Grewal Mizanur Rahman Jaesung Song The Albert Nerken School of Engineering
Professor Dorit Aviv Advisor and Faculty Collaborator
Katherine Sullivan Margaux Wheelock-Shew The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
Contributing Artist Melissa Fleming
Emma John Administrative Associate
The Fellowship Jury Professor Melody Baglione The Albert Nerken School of Engineering Dr. Nicholas D’Avella Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences at The Cooper Union Associate Dean Stamatina Gregory The School of Art Associate Dean Elizabeth O’Donnell The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Professor David Turnbull The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture
The CUISD Glacier Folio Project Research and Graphic Design Charlie Blanchard Maja Hjertén-Knutson Alexander McLean Andrea Pinochet Chris Taleff Professor Kevin Bone Advisor Emma John Project Manager
Graphic Design Inessa Shkolnikov Design Director The Cooper Union Center for Design & Typography