Maps and networks online

Jeremiah told us on Tuesday (5th)  that the deadlines have moved again. He also told us that the maps and networks project will all be online now. Most likely it will be as a magazine publication, so I need to rethink how to make my project, although I will for sure keep the concept. I think I will do drawings, as I was already considering it, and now I´m not sure if there is much more for me to do. I also think it would be nice to have my drawings in a magazine, not just some photographs.

Tutorial 7th January

I had a tutorial with Jeremiah, which was very useful. I had some questions about the new project format, mainly if we could use moving image, or if it had to be stills only. I also wanted to see what he thought about my project and what to do instead of using a projector. I´m hoping that this afternoon he will talk about when we will possibly restart in person learning.

My notes from the tutorial:

• Am I thinking about the aesthetics of google maps only, or also the interface, how it shows what it shows?
• OBS, (innovation and interference folder myUCA), screen recording for adding movement, zooming etc. Should experiment
• Plug in to pull high definition photos from google maps, better than a screenshot, I could build a photo library
• Timeline,  I have the past and the present. What does the future look like? Dystopian? Positive? Consider different possibilities - ex. 3 different views: garden of Eden, desolate, technology- past, present future

• Show different places around the globe, to show it is a worldwide problem, (not just one group of people)
• "Ghost forest" could be a good title, haunted expression, a way to represent something that is hard to represent or imagine, ex. not just a forest burning, showing all the damage

• Jeremiah sent me a book called "The weird and the eerie", theory of haunted space, I should read especially the introduction 
• The hauntedness of a changing space

I think this tutorial helped me clear up my idea. 

A couple of days later:

I thought about doing the three places thing. I think I like it more than the looking into future, so instead of having three future options, I´ll have three countries. And instead of six images I think I want to keep it simple, so I´ll keep it at three. I´ve drawn another sketch to show what I mean.

I also drew a black sicklebill. I got a book of tropical birds for Christmas and I love it. I would like to add birds and especially tropical birds to my project. This one lives in New Guinea. 

I drew it on my iPad

no background version

Afterwards I thought that I´d probably rather have the birds from above, like they were on a map. I probably won´t be able to use this. 

From there I decided I should experiment with what it would look like to have the birds from above. I did a quick animation, again on my iPad to experiment with it. I was also thinking about their colours. Would I want them to be a normal bird colour or have a blueish hue, like a classic ghost. Or would they just be transparent to show the ghostiness. I tried to experiment with all the option and I quite like how it looks when they fly through each other and go transparent. 

GROUP MEETINGS

We decided on a title for our project: Torn together. We also established the five themes we will be grouped under: Boundary, Dependency, Identity, Constellations, Debris. I need to decide which one works best for me. I think I could fit mine in any of them, although maybe not identity or constellations. Boundary could be the line between environmental decay and balance, the boundary between humans and nature, territories, the boundary that we have crossed over. It could even be the boundary between life and death, to go with my ghosts. Dependency could mean the dependency we have on nature for protection, medicine, food, inspiration, clean air, clean water etc, and the other way round, nature is depending on us to defend it. Debris as the bits we left behind, the mess we´ve made.

We also started to look into the design of our website. We will have access to Squarespace later in the week, so we were already looking at the designs. My favourite was this one: Hawley - Website Template - Squarespace I think it´s really nice and simple, and we could have all five themes right at the beginning (just the words) and then when you hover over them you get an image. Clicking into one will let you see all the student work under that one theme. The themes could then freely have their own colour codes and styles freely, without clashing with the others.

I started the 14 day free trial of Squarespace to experiment with it. I wanted to see what options there are. I will continue to play around with it later on. For now here is what I made:

This also doubles as an OBS practice. I just downloaded it and I am still figuring out how to use it. I also watched Jeremiah´s video on it now, it doesn´t seem too hard to use.

Development of my project

I found this really interesting website that monitors deforestation in Borneo and Papua. https://atlas.cifor.org/  

Here is a couple of screenshots from when I was looking at the site. It shows land used for palm oil plantations (black), pulpwood, areas affected by forest fires, mills etc

A close up of the land used for a palm oil plantation, you can see the scale of it here. The map has coloured it black to make it stand out from the forest areas. I could maybe use a screenshot like this for my final project.

The guardian has a really cool interactive piece on palm oil: From rainforest to your cupboard: the real story of palm oil - interactive | Guardian Sustainable Business | The Guardian

"Palm oil only grows in some of the world's most biodiverse countries. Indonesia is the largest producer of the ubiquitous oil, with palm oil plantations already spanning more than 6m hectares."
I really recommend reading through it. It is very interesting to see the scale of it and the human impact it has. The interactivness of it is very engaging too.

""Haze from forest fires on deforested peatland near a palm oil company. Thousands of peatland fires - the majority within pulp and palm oil concessions - have caused record-breaking air pollution in Singapore and Malaysia." This is the sort of destruction seen in Indonesia. 

Next I tried to find a similair site for Amazon, but didn´t. I didn´t find many useful images. I thought the two below were interesting. The first one is a satellite image of forest fires and the second one is the kind of image I could use for my project. I´m not sure if it´s high enough quality.

To get my third place I wanted a different type of climate and thought of a boreal forest. Finland fits into this so I wanted to have a look into that. Of course I have a connection to Finland, so it would be interesting to have that as a part of my project.

My family has a little cabin in the woods in Finland, so I do feel connected to the forest there. We spend our summers living there, swimming in the lake, going on walks and picking berries and mushrooms. A few years ago they cut down a very large part of the forest right behind our cabin (as we don´t own that land we had no say in it). We were of course very upset about it. You can actually see it in google maps:

Our cabin is the very last one on the road, on the left.

It still makes me very sad to think about it and it is a subject that is important to me. However after some research on forest land in Finland, I decided I wouldn´t add it to my project. Deforestation is not a big issue in Finland, in fact forest lands are slowly growing. Also the reason why they cut the forests in Finland is only for the wood. These means they dont destroy the entire land at the same time, they only cut the trees. They also always leave a few to trees to give them a chance to grow back. Even though it is sad and at the moment impossible to walk, it will eventually grow back and so the damage in the end is not much.

https://www.greenpeace.org/finland/toimi/suomen-metsat/

Next I found this by looking for timelapses by google maps. It´s called google earth:

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/

Screenshots of before and after of my favourites:

I screen recorded my favourite ones, using OBS again:

I found several super interesting timelapses on google engine. I definitely think this could be what I use for my final project. I find the sea one particularly interesting , because I hadn’t even thought of doing water before. I think it would cool to have that as it would be different from the rest. I could make aquatic ghosts.