Abrupt Climate Change

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Peter Terezakis

Final Projects

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Methanezilla – Benny Rendell and Deb DeSantos

Reduce or Die – Delia Kenagy and Claire Yezbak


Pay Attention – Maddie Boudov and Wyatt Baker

The Future Is Calling
Written and Directed by
Audrey Kim Chung
with
Jason Hoover, Audrey Hoover, Pierce Elliot, and Kevin Gill
Filmed by Ana Marks

The Sorry Project, Josh Zacher

After two months, I have a finished film! I’ve learned a lot throughout this process both as a person and an artist, but I am very proud of what I made.

I have to thank Justin Scholar a million times for all of his help and support throughout this entire process.

I was very taken by the fact that 3 states have outlawed the term “climate change.”

Please check out some of my inspiration from Greenpeace.org, Rob Marshall, Flint, and Donald Trump.

The film is also on my website!

Final Project for Abrupt Climate Change Fall 2021

Written, Edited, and Directed by Maria Lozada-Belisario

[Read more…] about Final Projects

Seaweed Shelter – Elias Wirth

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Seaweed Shelter Concept, Elias Wirth

  Seaweed Shelter PDF

My final project was really a chance for me to combine two of my passions and skills, seaweed and architectural drafting, and explore the exciting world of sustainable materials. As I am a training architect or landscape architect, I thought it would be a great opportunity to research the possibilities that seaweed can provide, especially in terms of being a bio-based construction material with high carbon storage. I thought about creating a seaweed education centre first, but I realized that starting off small is the way to go as I had to research what was even possible to build with seaweed, and whether seaweeds have the desired properties to make them a green alternative to man-made artificial construction materials like cement and bricks- which contribute enormously to global warming and annual emissions from humans. Therefore I decided to focus on creating a design for a sustainable “Seaweed Emergency Shelter,” as I felt that this would be a good starting point to really test and probe whether seaweed is a suitable, cost-efficient material.

My goal- which I succeeded- was to create a more comfortable, and most importantly, greener emergency shelter than the “Better Shelter” which I had identified as a leading product in the market but lacking many things in my opinion as made from plastic mostly. I was, therefore, in contact with both seaweed researchers and emergency shelter designers who helped me with questions along my journey to creating the Seaweed Shelter. David Thalen from Better Shelter and Kathryn Larsen, an independent seaweed researcher from Denmark helped me with questions and gave me feedback with my design proposal- they both supported me greatly and thought my concept was a very interesting one, and one they would be happy to support further. I also had a trained architect, Jean Phifer, look over my designs and give me feedback.

I came up with my Shipping Pallet Seaweed Insulation module, in response to David Thalen’s advice that time and building material constraints are the biggest hurdles for emergency shelters. I combined a bioplastic with hemp to create hard insulation panel boards following a Youtube recipe. Shipping pallets are very suitable as structural support, especially as available easily and cheaply globally.

My biggest challenge was creating a concept that is still very much in the early phases of research internationally and thus I had difficulty researching what seaweeds are suitable for construction. Also as I was in NYC I was limited to conceptual thinking and planning and was unable to build anything physically. However, now I can say that I have a good idea of the material potential and I will definitely like to use it in future architecture projects, both aesthetically and functionally.

 I feel that I succeeded with my goal of a green emergency shelter concept. Another big success for me was discovering a seaweed community that I had no idea existed, both of seaweed artists and scientists, which I am now a part of after setting up a seaweed shelter Instagram account- now with over 50 followers.

My next step is to build a simple prototype using the shipping pallets, and test to see how durable a simple 6 sided structure would be, and how good of an insulator. 

I can say for certainty that we are indeed on the verge of a seaweed revolution, not just in terms of creating seaweed for eating and energy, but also in the world of architecture, seaweed will be a green material of the future. I am very excited to be part of this wave of discovery and will continue to explore and build seaweed architecture. 

Every Drop Matters, Kevin Lot

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Name: Kevin Loh School: NYU Tisch School of Arts Major: Film & Television Level: Junior Project Title: Every Drop Matters
Issue Identified: The global water crisis, the lack of awareness of it in America and New York City, along with how a shortage could eventually happen in NYC. 

Purpose of Project:  To act as a short documentary/PSA that raises awareness on the global water crisis, along with how organizations like WaterAid look to combat it. The documentary’s goal is to be educational, pushing audiences to be grateful for what they have and put in extra effort to spread WaterAid’s mission and live a more sustainable lifestyle. 

Achieving Goals: Research on the global water crisis, followed by contacting WaterAid. Then, doing an interview with a worker from WaterAid to gain insight into their mission and the global crisis. Completed this in addition to filming footage of New York City. 
 
Creation: YouTube link is above. 
 
Interaction: The public can interact with the video through YouTube and Instagram.
 
Results: Comments from viewers include making a shorter, more concise version of the documentary, along with making the credits sequence separate from the last clip so it doesn’t distract from what Ellie is saying. Other viewers were receptive of the message and enjoyed the style and the to-the-point content. 
 
Takeaways: I had a wonderful time talking to Ellie Tillotson at WaterAid. It was great to gain insight to their missions and get stories from WaterAid’s work. I was glad to have been able to get footage and use clips from WaterAid’s YouTube videos as well. 
 
Success: I think there was success in how I was able to keep the documentary short enough that people won’t lose interest. I was able to make it informational but also raise awareness and start a call to action in a way. 
 
Next Time: I’d love to make a longer version as there were many things Ellie Tillotson said that were left on the cutting room floor. 

Aleka Agre Final Project Summaries

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Aleka Agre:

Citizen Researcher

For my final this semester, I’ve been creating a 60-second video that’s a combination of interviews and animations to highlight and help introduce people to the Citizen Researcher project. This project is a Sea Level Change Digital Elevation APP that’s currently in development by David and Denise Holland that will allow anybody who wants to participate to collect scientific data by recording their location and the date to help create a detailed map of the land surface elevation of the UAE. 

Working on scientific projects like this that have real-world implications is such a privilege and I’m excited to continue to work on more visualizations for and with scientists in the future.

Thwaites Glacier: Icefin Robot

This is the final version of the Thwaites Glacier Icefin Robot animation that I made for David and Denise Holland. The main goal of this project is to help high school students gain an interest in climate science, not as a topic of doom and gloom, but as an exciting exploration of the planet in new ways never seen before.

Through this project, I learned a lot about Thwaites and the amazing robot, the Icefin, which are both incredibly interesting and so important to understand the changes happening on the planet today. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to work on this project and I’ve really enjoyed being a part of it.

For anyone interested in learning more about either Thwaites or the Icefin you can check out this link or if you want to see the full, unedited footage from the Icefin under Thwaites you can find that here.

”Georgia Tech News Front Page,” Georgia Institute of Technology 2 Apr. 2015

“Icefin Robotic Vehicle at the Seafloor under the Ross Ice Shelf.” Georgia Tech, Youtube, 4 Apr. 2015

“PBS NewsHour.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 19 Feb. 2020, 

“Thwaites Glacier.” ITGC Thwaites Glacier

Other Projects

I’ve also done a wide variety of work for many different types of clients using After Effects, Illustrator, and Photoshop as illustrated here:

alekaagre.com   •   IG: @alekaagre

Owen O’Leary: Understanding the Climate Crisis Through Music

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Owen O’Leary
Tisch Drama
Senior
 
Understanding the Climate Crisis Through Music
 
To the average person, myself included, it can be very difficult to understand the formulas, numbers, and graphs that scientists produce to explain the changes to the patterns identified in relation to the earth. The CO2 levels and rate that ice caps are melting is hard to wrap your brain around especially if it isn’t affecting you directly.  How can I as an artist take cold hard mathematical information and turn it into something special, human, and real?
 
The phrase math is music is something that you’ve likely heard, and it is very true. Almost all music after the invention of chant can be broken down into rhythm and intervals, dividing beats per minute and measuring intervals between notes. Therefore things like statistics and graphs can be synthesized into music. I decided to focus on four particularly outrageous numbers to see how I could transform them into 1 minute songs, and make accompanying videos to post on tiktok.
 
The first song focuses on the 47 completed environmental policy rollbacks completed under the trump administration. Out of context 47 doesn’t sound like that many so my goal was to recontextualize that number to help understand it more. My plan was to gradually increase the snaps in the song to make the total feel more overwhelming. 
 
The next song focuses on the fact that 2/3rds of North American bird species are at risk of extinction due to climate change. I decided to use the call of the Brown Thrasher and break it down by rhythm and tone. Many beautiful calls like this are at risk of never being heard again due to brush fires and sea levels rising. I identified that the tones fit into the key of G and identified the tempo. I then used several instruments to support the bird call and an organ to mimic and echo the call.
 
The next song focuses on the melting of the Antarctic Icecaps. This is a statistic that is particularly tricky to conceptualize.  My goal was to have a song deteriorate at the same rate as the ice. I used the first graph on this page to change into music.  Every measure of the song represents 1 year and every BPM (beat per minute) represents 75 billion metric tons of ice. The tempo slows 2 beats per minute for every measure, therefore the song slows at a rate of 151 metric tons of ice per year. 
 

My final song focuses on CO2 levels in the atmosphere and uses intervals to help humanize the intervals on the graph that can be found here.  I placed a musical staff on the graph lines and placed notes on noticeable shifts on the graph. Now you can visually and audibly follow along with this graph, the last note being absurdly high, putting into context how out of control CO2 emissions have become. 

 
After I created these songs, I called on my friends to help me make fun approachable choreography for the video element of my project. I then uploaded these videos to tiktok to try to reach people. These videos can be found here:
 
 
 
 
They each were viewed a few hundred times and shared several times. All of the comments were very supportive and I also shared them to my Instagram story where they got a few hundred views. While the tight community I have created responded very well to these videos, they, unfortunately, did not reach a larger audience. 
 
I learned a great deal from this project as far as actual climate change statistics as well as the process of synthesizing math into music. I think it is a skill that I can fine-tune and use in the future. As long as scientists are able to communicate data I will be able to transform it into beautiful music.  I think there are both successes and failures in my project. Some successes are: completing the project and fulfilling requirements, both flexing my skills and gaining new ones, reaching several hundred people with my art and message. Some failures are: Not reaching the size audience I anticipated, being unable to post footage for one of my songs. Two things I would do differently next time are, one, making the songs between 15-30 seconds long as opposed to a minute, and two, I would try to make things that had to be explained a little less. That being said I am extremely proud of my work and have grown very much as an artist from this experiment.