Looking back at past prompts, I can see a sense of progress in my interpretation of climate change; how climate change is, could and should be presented on the media; and acquiring new concepts and knowledge on this matter at a more complex level than before. In a way, the sense of progress was shown through each assignment. This was all happening under the difficult and limited circumstances that we, as media practitioners and children of the Earth, are going through due to a global health emergency.
At the start of the course, my mentality on the issue was both reluctant and eager to learn more about it. This started to shift to the more ethical direction as I read the reading Deep Adaptation by Jem Bendell. I have never seen any sort of document that addresses the matter of climate change the same way. In particular, I was struck at sentences like “climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term” (p. 2) and “But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your all life” (p. 13). These are powerful statements that for the first time gave me an artistic approach to climate change in using words. In a way, I use remixed speeches to produce the video in prompt 2. This is a method that I looked to use throughout the course because I found that there are too many good talks and speeches that could be game changers in changing people’s perspective about the matter. Ultimately, I also took this method into my media artefact.
Another reading that inspired me was the one on ecological grief by Cunsolo and Ellis in which they discuss this form of grief “isn’t being publicly or openly acknowledged” (p. 275). I think provoking ecological grief could be a vital way in helping others to acknowledge the matter more, and the fact that it is rather not widely recognised is one that I tried to attempt. My main attempt came via the first part of the final media work in which I tried using human’s suffocation instead of sea creatures in addressing the impact of the plastic crisis. I thought this would be more relatable as even I while producing found it to be quite disturbing. Another important reading that helped me to shape the approach for the final work was Johns-Putra’s A new critical climate in which the scholar discusses different approaches in climate change media.
I ultimately used both factual and artistic approaches in the final work and in my opinion, the two ways sound quite distinct to one another. Even though I was happy with both parts as individual works, I think being together as one media piece ruined them. Both had the role to show the impact of plastic crisis as a whole, but ultimately did not supplement to one another. If I could work on this again, I might have gone fully with the artistic approach as I think that particular part of my podcast was more powerful in provoking a sense of ecological grief.
On the matter of constraints, the project gave me some surprise discoveries. I initially thought that by not allowing myself to use news media, I should look into using music to make the project impactful. But in the end, I worked myself around this most notable constraint by using speeches and different sounds. No music was used to my surprise, and I was quite happy with it. However, I was hoping to use different languages of different people to showcase the plastic crisis as being a global issue. This was a suggestion that I got from the pitch and I really liked it. However, the language of the latter part was only English as I could not find suitable footage to include.
In the end, I think even though it has some flaws, my media work was a powerful piece of climate change media. I think it was able to show the impact of the plastic crisis, while the end of it gives hope with an emphasis that the younger generation – our generation can change the root of the problem. I hope to help anyone who listens to it having a better understanding of the effect of plastic on the global scale and maybe change how they would approach plastic goods from now on, especially when throwing them away.
References
Bendall, J 2018, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, accessed online: <https://jembendell.com/2019/05/15/deep-adaptation-versions/ (Links to an external site.)>.
Cunsolo, A & Ellis, NR, ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss (Links to an external site.)‘, Nature Climate Change, vol.8, no.4, p.275-281.
Johns-Putra, A 2013, ‘A New Critical Climate (Links to an external site.)’, Symploke, vol. 21, no.1-2, p. 7-10.