Archives for April 2020

 

 

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”

– Bertolt Brecht, Motto.

With the world grinding to a standstill as a result of the COVID-19 virus, we as a collective turn once more to the arts as a means of unifying us and holding onto hope. Television, music, film, crafts, culinary arts – it is through creation that we endure.

The virus has halted many processes and projects dead in their tracks, forcing people to reinvent their creations for a digital world. This term’s iteration of the Waller Creek Earth Day Project, also referred to as the Creek Monster Project, is no exception.

As a member on the audio team for this project, we were originally responsible for creating a soundscape near the Service Building that students could escape to, where our calming ambient compositions would flow into the natural ambience of Waller Creek itself. The soundscape would have included communal hammock racks for students to relax in, ample shade from the trees’ foliage, and perhaps some tabled seating as well. The site would have also been the meeting place for multiple guided yoga events, hosted with help from Healthy Horns.

A secondary soundscape was also planned to be placed in front of the Bass Concert Hall, which would play various environmental wellness pledges from students and faculty across all of UT. A variation of the ambience at the student soundscape would have been playing in the nest installation as well.

However, with social distancing and self-quarantine being a must in order to preserve personal wellness, these plans are now being either repurposed or documented and stowed away for the distant future.

Our Work, Pre-Pandemic

Prior to this virus, our team had achieved many of our goals towards creating the soundscapes. Speaker placement, cable lengths, and audio flow are all planned out, with the cables all cut and labeled properly. The compositions are all complete and set up in software for recurring playback throughout the day. A final cable to run the length under the bridge near the student soundscape was awaiting delivery, and possibly more cables would be required for the Bass Concert Hall soundscape. The logistics of setting up the sound system itself also needs some polish.

Going Forward

With the circumstances the way they are, my team will be dividing what has been done and what remains to be done into two categories: elements that can be repurposed and elements to save for a future date. We plan to create a design document that will allow future teams to pick up where we left off with ease, as well as work with the other sub-teams to see how our audio can be reused. As we were also working on hosting yoga events, we will instead look for online resources that are readily available for anyone to follow along with yoga routines at home.

We face a plethora of challenges of course, most of which boil down to inconsistencies in available resources, the difficulties of remaining in communication, and the ever-growing feeling of despair followed by the subsequent lack of motivation I have seen arising in my peers; however, we will remain steadfast and face them together through regular check-ins and maintaining flexibility on expectations and goals. For even in the darkest of times, there will be music.

https://soundcloud.com/official-guey/sounds-of-a-small-creek

Goals for the project

With the Earth Day project our intention throughout the process has been to bring our community together to celebrate the living world. We are doing this by sharing stories that highlight UT researchers and their work with our local environment, and by creating a wellness space for the community to connect with Waller Creek on campus. As part of the installation team my contribution has been to bring interest and life to the space at night through the integration of lighting. Through these material engagements we hope to create an inviting space that generates curiosity for passing pedestrians and also displays the creek as the active living ecosystem it is. In the design phase of our course we identified two main components that we wanted to bring special attention to through lighting, these were the trees bordering Waller Creek that are within the 100 year floodplain and our central Nest structure. We chose to band the trees, with decomposable burlap and low power LED lights, at the 100 year floodplain because these flooding events are very disruptive to both human and natural environments and are largely caused by the use of non-permeable building techniques. All of the water runoff from our roads and parking lots drain into the creek not only create flash floods but deposit harmful substances into the creek. Research done on campus led by Stuart Reichler investigates harmful chemical compounds found in Waller Creek, where they originate, and categorizes the main threats to the creeks ecological health. By creating a striking visual manifestation of the floodplain our hope is to raise awareness of the issue and have the opportunity to share ways of mitigating these disturbances.           

Progress Made

Designing, assembling and coding a custom outdoor lighting system that is waterproof, energy efficient, easy to install/take down, and able to run every night for all of April is no small effort to pull off in a semester’s time. We quickly had to settle on a course of action and begin prototyping and gathering the necessary materials to pull off our vision. We surveyed our site at 24th Street and San Jacinto and picked 12 trees along the creek that we wanted to band with burlap and lighting. We took note of all the tree IDs, their circumference, their distances from each other, and the height of the floodplain at that tree’s position. This allowed us to plan out how much material is required to cover all the trees and let us determine the length of cable needed to run power between each of the trees. Power is run from central locations because battery and solar options were both cost prohibitive and would have resulted in more harmful materials being used in the process. For lighting control, we decided on a distributed control system, using DIY micro-controllers with embedded wireless connectivity (ESP32), so each tree is able to run independently and communicate with the rest to create patterns that move throughout the space. This ensures that the system will continue running even if a few trees go offline but also allows for a unified visual throughout the entire space. Unfortunately, we have yet to realize all the elements of the design because the COVID-19 pandemic prevented us from installing and working on the installation to completion. 

Obstacles to overcome

The biggest obstacle for all of us right now is the current pandemic, which has halted far more than this Earth Day project we were hoping to share with the campus community this semester. In fact I see many parallels between the 100 year flooding event we were hoping to highlight and this current pandemic we find ourselves in. Both are powerful forces of nature that are created in conjunction with the way humans are organizing and living on the Earth. What I find critical here is to notice how our actions and ways of living are creating the conditions for these events to occur and what we can do to mitigate them in the future. We must raise awareness around these topics so that we do not simply slip back into our old habits but instead take these troubling times seriously and work with them to ensure flourishing for all species. With social distancing and the resulting mental wellness ramifications, connecting our community with stories and practices of celebration and mourning are only more salient. Luckily, a large part of this project from the beginning has been reaching our community through social media, so now the challenge is to bring some part of what we hoped to manifest physically into the digital space. My hope is that this distance can give us all time to reflect and attend to those things in our life which have been neglected, be it our house plants or friendships. With my remaining time in this Earth Day course my attention will be on looking to nature and sharing stories of recuperation, so that through sharing these we might find continuing meaning, hope, and connection. 

I was brought into the Creek Monster project with its version last year already established. As a member of the social engagement team, my duty lies within the realm of creating and distributing collateral to get the word out there.

I thought that a Snapchat filter would be fun to have at the event, where the focus was nature. It was also a form of advertising, and one that didn’t require paper. I started with a few sketches depicting what they could look like.

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I took the previous design and made it look kind of like a puppy, so people could look at it and think, wow, I would like to take care of this thing– see it happy and thriving. A few iterations later, we decided on several different filters that cover the range of what the event was about.

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However, with the virus happening, we had to shift gears. My attention started to focus on the social media posts that we would be uploading instead. What I do now is take posters from my team members with information on them, and add icons and small graphics.

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Next our team needs to gather up that public presence through our online presence. Since the virus, the Earth Day celebration will be held online, so a detailed social media schedule, environmental roadmap, and some hard work should do it in no time. My ultimate goal for the project is to see it end up the best it can be, and to spread some more awareness on the importance of taking care of our home planet.