PlaNet in Crisis is a series of web pages exploring the fragmented, confusing, and ambient nature of climate change-related grief.
PlaNet in Crisis is a series of web pages that traverse emotional responses to climate change. In a series of “rooms” that the viewer can visit, the project presents various forms of interactive text and generative ecological art, all leaning into the surreal feelings that emerge when grappling with a planet in suffering. Studies have shown that young people across the globe are responding to climate change with emotions such as sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, helplessness, and guilt. Climate change emotions can also manifest across different timescales: felt in grief for extinct species, for land lost to unfolding natural disasters, and as young people grieve for their lost futures. Sometimes, the way that climate change information is presented can be so overwhelming that people become apathetic to the subject.
The project consists of a minimalistic home page, with buttons that lead to an introduction to the project, in addition to pages numbered 1-4. The introduction contains clickable text with an ambient style, grounding the user in the context of the project with a poem inspired by Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. Page 1, titled “The Algorithmic Beauty Of Slow Violence”, features three slowly growing fractal trees and a clock counting down to July 28, 2028, which is the estimated date that the earth will reach 1.5 degrees warming. The trees generate a new layer roughly every 6 minutes, and it takes 38 minutes for the trees to grow a full cycle. The second page is called “Understanding our interconnected world”, it is a collective canvas made using WebSocket, where multiple users can visit and generate moss-like visuals on each other’s browsers. The third page, “Corporate Rhetoric as Reassurance” projects an ExxonMobil press statement on climate policy onto a 3D visualization of global temperature change from 1880 to 2016. Combined with audio of a 10-hour oil engine sound originally posted on a white noise channel for sleep, this page hits on the strangeness of the relationship between corporate and consumer. The fourth page is inspired by the fact that in order to grapple with confusing emotions, naming them is a start. When the user opens the page, they are greeted with text that reads, “what does it mean to think about climate change as a way of mourning?” and they are able to type a response that rotates randomly, creating a winding effect to echo the non-linear fashion of climate emotions.
PlaNet in Crisis is a series of four distinct pages/rooms, reflecting the fragmented experience of processing climate grief. It takes advantage of the web browser as a form of time-based media, allowing user experiences to unfold over time, according to the temporal logic of climate change: its slowness and dispersion. Additionally, browser art can be accessed by multiple users at once, reflecting our interconnected relationship with the earth. Through this minimalist form, it aims to offer a space of solace and questioning — a collective anthology of grief and hope.
Tags:#climatechange#digitalhumanities#website