Wandering Dust

Inspired by the work of Danika Cooper

BY: BENNY JOHNSON, DEBBIE YUEN, JENNIFER WONG, KATHY WANG, SHUYANG YU, XIAOBAI JI, ZOE INGRAM

Danika Cooper is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her core research centers on the geopolitics of scarcity, alternative water ontologies, and designs for resiliency in the world’s arid regions. This exhibit is inspired by Cooper’s research on emphasizing alternatives to current stances on arid land development, specifically challenging modern neoliberal development strategies. In this exhibit, we tell two stories of future life in the arid lands: what happens if neoliberalism continues as the driver for developing the arid lands? What if arid land development radically departs from neoliberalism?

Image 1: An image that illustrates drylands' ecological, economic, and cultural value. Image credit Danika Cooper.

The Results

Podcast, Artifact, Exhibit

The team of 6 students split into smaller teams to create a podcast, plan an interactive exhibit, and build an artifact for the exhibit. I contributed to the exhibition team.

Here are some images from our exhibition where we challenged visitors to rethink climate change through "baseline futures" and "preferred futures". Visitors experience our exhibition by walking through the booth and interacting with our augmented reality experience.

An individual opens up their phone's camera and focuses in on the newspaper in front of them. A new newspaper displaying "preferred futures" appears in place of the physical newspaper.

Afterwards, visitors may play with the interactive, AR sandbox. Scanning each tile or item helps visitors illustrate how our futures may look like.

Here, a visitor plays with our interactive sandbox.