User:Catalina/Thesis Proposal

Title

Sky Islands: a time machine of the Andes Mountains

What do you want to make?

Sky Islands: a time machine of the Andes Mountains is an exploration of how to display scientific information using digital art, 3D animation, and data visualization as the contemporary tools to imagine ecosystems in the past times. A group of researchers has been analyzing the climate change and the evolution of the páramos and ecosystems of Northern Andes for over the last 50 years. Their studies have been focused both on its relevance in present and past times (see studies from A. Cleef and T. van der Hammen and H. Hooghiemstra, among others). After studying pollen fossil, aging materials, sedimentation rates, current species of plants, different type of ecosystems and its geographical distribution (among others), they found unique long fossil pollen records of Andes Mountains (e.g. Torres et al., 2005, 2013; Groot et al., 2011, Bogotá et al., 2011; Hooghiemstra 1984), and they found a way to explain the spatial dynamics and evolution of Andean biomes (Flantua & Hooghiemstra, 2017, Flantua et al., 2014; Flantua & Cleef, 2016, Van der Hammen 1974).

Imagine the Páramos as highly diverse ecosystems currently restricted to mountain Andes tops (resembling an archipelago of islands) but in the past, they dominated large surface areas throughout the Northern Andes. Driven by large scale cycles of climate change, the páramo ‘islands’ shifted altitudinally along the mountain slopes, heavily influenced by the topography that determined the degree of Páramo fragmentation and connectivity in the past. During cold conditions, the low elevational position of the Páramos cause the many isolated Páramo islands to fuse, while during warmer conditions the Páramos form isolated archipelagos in a connectivity- disconnectivity dance, a mechanism described as the ‘flickering connectivity system’ (Flantua & Hooghiemstra, 2017).

Today, the challenge is to find a pathway of telling this results in a visual form. This project is a science, art, and technology convergence or a pathway for an innovative education model that explore theories from different disciplines and engage researchers, students, and general audiences to make them understand this important evolutive natural process that took millions of years in the Northern Andes of South America. This project will envision how the shifting elevational distributions of the Andean ecosystems was caused by cold and warm conditions driven by cycles in a macro scale of time and space, called the Milankovitch cycles (Muller et.al 1997), how the diversification of species increased after this large-scale cycles and how an evolutive process that expends thousands of years is being deteriorated in just hundred years of extreme human activity.

How do you plan to make it?

The complete process includes pre-production, production, and post-production following the next steps.

A.Pre-Production: Storytelling and timeline

The storytelling of Sky Islands: a time machine of the Andes Mountains is based on publications and meetings with IBED’s researchers in order to understand and make a transformation of the results into a storytelling which follows a timeline of the last 2.6 million years (Last Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene and Anthropocene geological periods) and it will take three parts:

1.There is a macro-scene from outside the Earth which represents the glacial and interglacial Milankovitch cycles eccentricity, and precession of the Earth's orbit. They resulted in cyclical variation in the solar radiation reaching the Earth, and this orbital forcing strongly influenced climatic patterns on Earth and are very connected with the evolution of Paramos.

2. A general scene from Northern Andes to visualize and understand the main vegetation dynamics. This mechanism is called Flickering Connectivity System and shows how the Andean ecosystems (paramos and Andean forests) moved down and up in altitude. As well as paramos expanded and contracted to form archipielagos or sky islands. This camera point of view is mirroring the macro-scene from outside the Earth but showing the same process in the mountains. There will be a clock showing the time-machine, and extra information about the three ecosystems altitude and meaning of colors (temperature and ecosystems).

3. A close-up at the central Andes in Colombia to show changes in more detailed perspective. To show how the páramo archipelago changed over the last 2.6 million years. For this part, we chose six scenarios as the most representative snapshots of the whole storyline. These scenarios will be repeated in similar conditions of glacial and interglacials periods but in different moments of time during the last 2.6 million years.

• Scenario 1: Pliocene. The paramos were just born some 2.6 million
• Scenario 2: Pleistocene. Interglacial (Warm conditions). 1 million years before present, Alnus tree entered in the northern Andes.
• Scenario 3: Pleistocene. Glacial (stadial mild conditions).480.000 years before present. Quercus tree enter in Northern Andes.
• Scenario 4: Pleistocene. Glacial (mild interstadial conditions). X, Y, Z years
• Scenario 5: Holocene. Interglacial (cool conditions). X, Y, Z y years
• Scenario 6: Interglacial in the Anthropocene, deforestation, actual conditions, today.

B. Production: Illustration Design + Revision and Animation + Revisions I am making a 3D animation using Cinema 4D and VUE. For final renders, I am using After Effects and Adobe Premier. To generate the real landscapes of Andes mountains, I am using high-resolution Data Elevation Models (DEM) from satellite images. To design plants, I will use VUE-Plant Factory. General and technical steps are modeling, texturing, lighting, animating, camera animating and rendering.

C. Post-Production: Rendering + Revisions and Final editing + Revisions This final step is dedicated to making final renders, editing of composition, effects and color correction.

D. Installation The final outcome will depend on facilities for materials. But I have three ideal possibilities:

1. Immersive 360 degrees video installation, the half screen will display the cycles outside of the Earth and the second half, the process happening in the mountains as a mirroring or a reflection of the Sun-Earth cycles.
2. A video installation using two confronted screens, but in this case, one screen will display the cycles outside of the Earth and the second screen the process happening in the mountains as a mirroring or a reflection of the Sun-Earth cycles.
3. A film 5 minutes editing screening. Additionally, the visualization will be integrated with additional explanations provided by researchers interviews. The results will be available in an open access domain, e.g. on the IBED server. And also will be part of the Installation.

What is your timetable?

Steps Process	4 Trimester	5 Trimester	6 Trimester
Pre-Production: Storytelling and timeline	x
Production: Illustration Design + Revision and Animation + Revisions	x	x	x
Post-Production: Rendering + Revisions and Final editing + Revisions			x
Installation			x

Why do you want to make it?

One of the reasons because I decide to explore digital arts as a biologist, it is a great concern about the ecological crises we are testifying and how the contemporary tools for visual communication can integrate sciences research and its results. I am totally convinced we can inter-cross these disciplines to create a lost awareness that reminds us why to protect and respect the natural environments on Earth.

In the times we are living today, the global warming is affecting not only our human species but also the whole species and inhabitants of the planet Earth. For this reason, this project seeks to envision how the past times in the Andes mountains took more than three million years to create an impressive diversification of ecosystems and species in the Páramos, but the transformation made by the humans in the Anthropocene or in just the last hundred years, has a magnitude able to extinct unique species that have been evolving and diversifying for at least three million of years in the northern Andes of South America. This visualization not only open a door to travel in a time machine, from the Last Pliocene to the Anthropocene, as a first step toward opening minds and creating awareness of the importance of evolution in the South American Andes ecosystems and its biodiversity, but also to incept a question about how we can change the future and our relationship with the Andes in a way to mend the disaster we have been creating?.

Finally, I found this Art-Science collaboration project, first very close to my heart and second an incredible opportunity to communicate visually the results reached by my own professors and colleges. First as a biology student and later as professional and pollen analyst, I had the opportunity of being part of their research group between 1998 and 2009, and now I found myself taking part as a visual artist and biologist. I am sure the resulted outcome not only will help students to better understand the dynamic history of the páramo ecosystem and high mountain ecosystems in general, but also will be relevant for a very large of the public audiences including scientists, universities, new media artists, schools, policymakers, and governments.

Who can help you or how?

This is collaboration project with the research team of Palaeoecology at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, which will be supported in Science by Ph.D. Suzette Flantua and Professor Henry Hooghiemstra. They will provide advice in science research, data and publications that will be the core of the visualization script and story. As well as I will have the support of Arts advisors at Piet Zwart Institute as Simon Pummell, Barend Onneweer, David Haines, Ine Lamers, Javier Lloret, Marloes de Valk and some professors at Willem de Kooning Academy for data visualization work.

Relation to previous practice?

As a biologist, I have been working in different research teams that investigate the past, present, and future ecosystems in Colombia. My interests as a researcher have been to understand how the changes in climate have been modifying plants and vegetation through different periods of time and space but also how to communicate that in a visual form. Today, my interest as a visual artist is to explore how to transform the knowledge created through the lens of science in a visual art piece using 3D animation. For the reasons above, I have been exploring life plant installations, video mapping projection, and photography of nature. Some of the projects I have done before took shape between 2011 and 2017 and were supported by many artists and technicians at the University of California- Santa Cruz, Piet Zwart Institute, Science Park (UvA) and the Eye Filmmuseum. (More info here http://www.catalhinagiraldo.com/art-installations)

Relation to a larger context?

In a larger context sense, the piece would be outlined inside the conceptual movement of artists exploring the metaphorical language of Planet Earth which started in the 70's, like “Planet Earth in Contemporary Electronic Artworks” and “Environmental Art”, which expression coined as an umbrella term to encompass Eco-Art/Ecological Art, Ecoventions, Land Art, Earth Art, Earthworks, and Art in Nature (Knebusch, 2004; Bower, 2010). To bring some examples for Environmental Art, there are over 150 artists, and close to 22 scientists and Science & Arts collaborative projects, organizations, programs, and residencies focused on this Eco-Art movement around the world (The Greenmuseum, 2010). A number that has been increasing with the current ‘Art in the Anthropocene”, a massive trans-disciplinary movement of artists, designers and scholars exploring the symbolic language of the Anthropocene (Anthropocene Agents, 2017; Dickinson, 2015; Alonso, 2015; Bourriaud, 2014). Artists since the 70’s that have been engaging audiences for climate change, restoration of ecosystems and protection of watersheds using models for sustainable restoration are Newton & Helen Mayer Harrison, AMD&ART/ T., Allan Comp, Jean Paul Ganem, Tim Collins & Reiko Goto, Yolanda Gutiérrez, Patricia Johanson, Lynne Hull, Ichi Ikeda and Aviva Rahmani.

To bring some of the most recent examples of events created to engage audiences for environmental issues in the framework of Anthropocene are:

1) ‘The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene’ at Taipei Biennale (2014) with the participation of 52 artists (http://www.taipeibiennial.org:8080/index.php/en/). As Bourriaud described (2014), the exhibition addressed the cross-overs appearing in the art of the Anthropocene; it was focused on artists for whom objects, products, computers, screens, chemistry, natural elements or living organisms are interconnected with humans, and can be used by them for a critical analysis of contemporary world. The exhibition highlighted the way artists focus on links, chaining, connections and mutations: how they envision planet earth as a huge network, where new states of matter and new forms of relations appear (Dickinson, 2015; Lin, 2015).

2) ‘7 MIL MILLONES’ (http://www.eacc.es/7-000-000-000/info/) referred to the total human population inhabiting Earth and was hosted at EACC in Valencia, Spain (Alonso, 2015).

3) ‘Dark Ecology project’ (2014, 2015, 2016) inspired by Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘Dark Ecology’ and his philosophy of ‘Ecology without Nature’. Morton offers a radical criticism of the modernist way of thinking about nature as something outside of us and instead proposes an interconnected “mesh” of all living and non-living objects (http://www.darkecology.net/about).

References

Alonso C. (2015). Artistic practices, discursive contexts and environmental humanities in the Age of the Anthropocene. Artnodes 15, I ISSN 1695-5951.

Bourriaud, N. (2014). The great acceleration. Art in the Anthropocene. http://www.taipeibiennial.org:8080/index.php/en/tb2014?phpMyAdmin=ef6946252cea3105a72033fb2f279321. (accessed 18-04-2017).

Bower, S. (2010). A Profusion of Terms. Greenmuseum.org. URL: http://greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=306. (accessed 06-04-2017).

Dickinson, B. (2015). Pleistocene, Holocene, Anthropocene. Features 02, ART MONTHLY, Sep 15, 389 pg.

Dark Ecology Project. (2014, 2015, 2016). http://www.darkecology.net/about. (accessed 04-18-2017).

Flantua, S.G.A., Hooghiemstra, H., Van Boxel, J.H., Cabrera, M., González-Carranza, Z., González-Arango, C., 2014. Connectivity dynamics since the Last Glacial Maximum in the northern Andes; a pollen-driven framework to assess potential migration, in: Stevens, W.D., Montiel, O.M., Raven, P.H. (Eds.), Paleobotany and Biogeography: A Festschrift for Alan Graham in His 80th Year. Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, pp. 98–123.

Flantua, S.G.A. & Hooghiemstra, H. (2017) Historical connectivity and mountain biodiversity. In: Hoorn, C., Perrigo, A., Antonelli, A. (eds). Mountains, Climate and Biodiversity. Wiley, Oxford, UK.

Francoeur, E. (1997). The Forgotten Tool: The Design and Use of Molecular Models. Social Studies of Science. 27(1), 7-40.

Groot M.H.M. (2012). ‘’Solving a Piece of the puzzle’’. Reconstruction of millennial-scale environmental and climatic change in the northern Andes during the last glacial cycle: An integration of biotic and abiotic proxy-information. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Amsterdam.

Knebusch, J. (2004). Planet Earth in Contemporary Electronic Artworks. Leonardo 37 (1), 18-24. URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/len/summary/v037/37.1knebusch.html (accessed 06-04-2017).

Lin, A. (2015). Taipei Biennial: The Great Acceleration. Art Review Issue. Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Jan & Feb 2015. URL: https://artreview.com/reviews/jan_feb_2015_review_taipei_biennial/ (accessed 06-04-2017).

Muller R. A. & MacDonald G. (1997). Glacial Cycles and Astronomical Forcing. Science 277 (5323): 215–8.

Symposium Agents in the Anthropocene: Trans/disciplinary practices in art and design education today. (2017).Piet Zwart Institute / Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. January 27-28, 2017. https://www.anthropoceneagents.nl (accessed 04-18-2017).

The Greenmuseum (2010). URL: http://www.greenmuseum.org/. (accessed 06-04-2017).

Torres, V., Vandenberghe, J., Hooghiemstra, H. (2005). An environmental reconstruction of the sediment infill of the Bogotá basin (Colombia) during the last 3 million years from abiotic and biotic proxies. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 226, 127–148. doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2005.05.005

Torres, V., Hooghiemstra, H., Lourens, L., Tzedakis, P.C. (2013). Astronomical tuning of long pollen records reveals the dynamic history of montane biomes and lake levels in the tropical high Andes during the Quaternary. Quaternary Science Reviews 63, 59–72. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.11.004 Van der Hammen, T. (1974) The Pleistocene changes of vegetation and climate in tropical South America. Journal of Biogeography 1, 3-26.

Van der Hammen, T. (1974) The Pleistocene changes of vegetation and climate in tropical South America. Journal of Biogeography 1, 3-26. --Catalina (talk) 18:00, 6 November 2017 (CET)