Statement

When it comes to visual efforts for climate issues, the typical approach—whether it’s posters, slogans, and declarations, or installations, paintings, and other artworks—often involves creating new images, such as extracting graphics from photographs of icebergs or abstracting the Earth into symbols. These images are neat, clean, and deliberately filtered, they achieve a more refined visual effect, but they also abandon the original context and detail. 

Most of the time, I’m confused about the meaning of such an approach: responding to climate issues by creating new visual languages. But for such topics, why do they need to be “new”? Is it because “new” is a proof of authorship, distinguishing new works from existing ones? Or is the effect generated by “new” more powerful? However, a real photograph often resonates with most people more than a designed poster, because it has a closer relationship with our visual experiences in life.

Therefore, our group attempted to generate new metaphors from existing images. This is a narrative approach akin to the scene in a suspense movie where blood flows under a door: the audience doesn’t directly see the murder, but they know something is happening behind the door. Similarly, instead of abstracting specific scenes into graphics or text, we work directly with these images taken from the real world, generating “hyperreal” from reality. Through them, we evoke people’s experiences with everyday images, create visual conflicts, and thereby hint at the presence of the climate crisis in daily life. Though typically invisible to the naked eye, we provide a way of seeing to make people aware of the issue’s existence. 

Reference List 

Jencks, C. and Silver, N. (2013) Adhocism : The Case for Improvisation. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 

This book has prompted me to think further why we melt images readily available, or rather, what melting means for such images. When discussing the systems behind new and old inventions, the book mentions how new systems often retain remnants of old visual and linguistic conventions, “Even today we ask how much ‘horsepower’ the engine has, just as with an airplane, that symbol of Futurist excellence, we talk about such things as the ‘cockpit’ and ‘runway’.” The “liquify” function in Photoshop and After Effects serves as another digital example: it’s an imitation of melting, a residue of physical properties on images. 

But what, literally, is the liquidisation of an image? It seems to be an imitation of real melting, but the effect it produces is surreal.

From the perspective of outcomes, perhaps I can answer the question this way: Liquification is the disruption of the original functionality of an image. For example, in the work during the second week, we collected images of various everyday items, such as a photo of a water cup. The original function of this photo was to show us that there is a water cup in the picture, but after we used a filter to make it melt, its function became to show us a melting water cup—the structure of the image’s cup was disrupted, but instead of water spilling out, the result was not liquid, but the image itself turning into a puddle, because it is an image, is the liquification of the image.  

(As I write this, I suddenly wonder if I could try some other ways to disrupt the images and see what consequences differ from the real world. For example, what would tearing them reveal?) 

Blauvelt, A., Maurer, L., Paulus, E.,  Puckey, J. and Wouters, R.  (2013) Conditional Design Workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz. 

This book made me reconceptualise our work from two perspectives: 1. the design conditions we set; 2. the content we produce.

One of the design conditions we set for our group work was that we chose everyday objects to be melted. When I realized it was a set limitation, I began to think further about its meaning. Why are everyday items being melted? What does the melting of these everyday items represent? Typically, everyday items are considered familiar and used every day without much attention, like how most people may not care about climate change because it doesn’t significantly affect our lives. However, when this filter magnifies this impact, we suddenly realize that a part of our lives is being disrupted. 

On the other hand, content-wise, what we created in the second week was a filter. “Graphic design moves from product to process, or from object to tool—an instrument for making many things.” As stated in the book, what we created was not an image but a tool for creating images. Such tools can place graphic design in a broader context, enabling others to use them “to engage the intrinsic complexity of technology and life.” Importantly, the results generated by these tools can be disseminated worldwide, accepted and feedbacked by others, which in turn influences the medium that originally initiated this process. And so the cycle continues, a kind of “Contextualising”.

Jain, A. (2020) Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics. Available at: https://superflux.in/index.php/calling-for-a-more-than-human-politics/# (Accessed: 22 February 2024).

This book inspired me to look beyond the human perspective on the impact of climate issues on our daily lives. In our group’s experiment, everyday items represent a traditional, human-centred perspective, while the physical and digital melting effects filter represents a non-human-centred, environmental perspective. When this filter is applied to everyday items, the two perspectives overlap, the everyday objects begin to melt, and the issue of conflict between the two perspectives is made visible. Combining this article with our experiment, perhaps what we are attempting to provide is a perspective beyond the human. This shift encourages individuals to step away from anthropocentrism and to engage in a visual reassessment of daily life, contemplating the roles and significance of other biotic and abiotic entities within our shared environment and social structures.

Bridle, J. (2023) Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. London: Penguin. 

The inspiring part of this book is the author’s approach to environmental issues. Bridle begins by recounting a walk through a lakeside forest, where in what appears to be a harmonious natural setting, careful observation reveals plastic tape wrapped around branches and saplings, and thick, damp marker pen labels plastered on wooden stakes. Bridle refers to these as “the tooth- and claw-marks of Artificial Intelligence,” the subtle traces left by larger issues in everyday life. Such marks emphasise the relationship between seemingly large environmental issues and everyday life: how the things we create affect society, agriculture, and the economy, how they impact the external environment, and ultimately, how they come full circle to influence the surrounding environment of our lives. 

In fact, much of our work over the past two weeks has been precisely about visually highlighting the traces of the climate crisis in our daily lives. Because of the enormity of this topic, it often doesn’t seem urgent when manifested in everyday life, to the extent that we have to zoom in on certain clues, highlight certain signs, and even consider pushing them towards an extreme portrayal. Thus, the water filter melts, the mug melts, and under our filter, one item after another is destroyed in daily life, prompting people to start considering why the disappearance of water filters or mugs is happening and what impact it will have on their lives.

Knowles, T. (2008) Tree Drawings. Available at: https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/knowles.php (Accessed: 22 February 2024). 

Tim Knowles’ work emphasizes the authorship of the tree, which inspired me to think about the role and significance of ice, the tool we practice with, in the process of recording. In terms of the creative process, unlike the tree, which requires paper and pen to leave a drawing mark, ice reshapes the images of its surroundings through its transparent and reflective properties, rather than leaving visible marks like a traditional drawing tool.

In terms of content, just as trees can create shapes with pen and paper, ice naturally has the potential to create certain content based on its inherent properties, which is precisely what our work in the second week was on. During the creation of the filter, we realised that if we wanted to create a visual representation of the impact of ice on the environment, the ice itself didn’t need to be present. The concept of “melting” is enough to imply the presence of the ice, and ‘melting as an image’ is the trace that the ice left on the image, the trace left in our daily lives.

Eliasson, O. (2020) Earth Speaker. Available at: www.earthspeakr.art (Accessed: 22 February 2024).

The commonality between this work and ours is that we both attempt to create a transformation of reality through filters, thus establishing a connection between contemporary daily life and environmental issues.

On the one hand, in Earth Speaker, Eliasson replaces children’s faces with non-human objects such as trees and the earth, anthropomorphising them and bringing them closer to people’s lives through language. Our filter replaces the presence of everyday objects in reality by melting them to reflect changes in the environment.

On the other hand, both of us emphasize the interactivity of the filter as a tool. However, unlike our intention to upload filters to social media platforms (output-input), Earth Speaker’s interactivity consists of two parts: a speaker installed in urban spaces, and real-time weather data from different regions of the Earth, which work together to interactively present the effects of climate change (input-output). This combined physical and digital presentation format inspires me to reconsider the part of our work concerning the physical filter of glasses. Can we find a more appropriate way to better coordinate physical and digital filters in form and expression so that they can work in a wider context?