User:Catalina/Thesis Outline

Structure:

Title

Sky Islands: A time machine of the Andes Mountains

Synthesis

(max. 250-300 words)
Sky Islands: A time machine of the Andes Mountains is a 3D animation where science, art, and technology converge as a media to explore the visualization for one chapter of the ecological history of the Northern Andes Mountains. 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 two million of years to create an impressive diversification of ecosystems and species, but the transformation made by the humans in the Anthropocene or in just the last hundred years, has a magnitud able to extinct unique species that have been evolving and diversifying for the last 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 relation with the Andes in a way to mend the disaster we have been creating?.

Acknowledgments

(max.250-300 words)

Introduction

(max.1000 words)
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.

Part one

Andes mountains (max.1500 words)
I was born in Bogotá Plain in Colombia. My childhood, adolescence and part of my adult experience was 2600 meters closer to starts in Bogotá City. As nature lover and traveler, biologist and amateur photographer, I experienced Paramos and Andean forests from the northern Peru to the northern Venezuela, crossing the three branches of colombian Andes cordilleras. In this part, I want to make a geographical and and ecological context of Northern Andes Mountains. This chapter will describe where the Andes mountains are located, how they look, what ecosystems are possible to find there, and finally what was the process of transformation and evolution of its ecosystems from the last 2.6 million of years (Last-Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene and the Anthropocene geological periods). The description will contain an explanation about glacial and interglacials cycles, and how they represent the flickering connectivity system, fragmentation, connectivity and speciation of the sky islands (Paramos).

I will use part of the essay I wrote last year:
From Pleistocene to Anthropocene: A story happening to the face of a planet called the Earth
https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Catalina/research

Part two

Re-connecting with Planet Earth: our Home (max. 1500 words)
One of the reasons because I decide to become an artist as a biologist, it is a great concern about the ecological crises we are testifying and how the new media arts is a good tool to communicate what science is researching and their results. I totally believe we can inter-cross these disciplines to create a lost awareness that remind us why to protect and respect the natural environments. That’s why in this part, I want to talk about what is climate change, global warming, solastalgia, biophilia and anthropocene and finally how the recent emergency of these concepts give us awareness about how we as human species are acting against our home and ourselves. I will use part of the essay I wrote last year: 2. Biophilia, Anthropocene, and Solastalgia: the last global concepts to give us a key about why we should search a Re-connection with Planet Earth: our Home

Part three

Artistic context of Sky Islands of the Andes Mountains (max. 1000 words)
The short experience I have exploring arts, it has gave me the opportunity to listen my own voice and express myself being inspired from other artists working on environmental issues from 70’s and recently from Anthropocene point of view. In this part, I want to talk about the context Ecological Art and Environmental Art in the Anthropocene Era.

Part four

(max. 1500 words)
Animation process, editing, and installation
After exploring and playing with microscopes, analog and digital cameras, and beamers as media objects, I started recently to learn 3D animation software as Cinema 4D, Vue and After Effects. In this part, I will describe how I found a way to use them to make possible this 3D animation and how the technical process and final result took shape.

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.

Conclusion

(max. 1000 words)