This project was a submission to The Phaistos Project/Forty-five Symbols for the 2017 Spring submission round. My project was chosen as an honorable mention, and you can still see it up on their website. The Phaistos Project is inspired by "The Phaistos Disc, which was discovered in 1908 and is thought to date to around 1700 BC, is a circular piece of fired clay stamped with forty-five distinct symbols. This code is still unresolved. It inspires the participants of The Phaistos Project — Forty-five Symbols to translate current concerns — political, economic, ecological, cultural, or social challenges — into collections of forty-five unique symbols. Design methodologies are used as a mode of inquiry to develop ethnographic visual narratives that are subjective, stimulating, and capture visual traces of the anthropocene." (45symbols.com) You can read more about their project here.
My project was inspired by climate change; I grew up aware of this phenomenon, and have continued to choose to be aware of it and its impacts on the world. I chose to make 45 symbols showing what climate change does, and will do, to animals. Throughout the project, I quickly realized how complex this world is; the entire earth is an ecosystem, and it's impossible to separate anything by effects and species, as we are all part of this world. This especially applies to humans and animals; humans are just animals with hands, complex social groups, and a brain that specializes in problem solving, but we got lucky and made tools before any other animal on earth. I hope those that stumble across my project are struck with this, as well as how silly it was for me to choose a bear symbol for "animal", even though 5 years later, humans are still plagued by a mutating disease like nothing we've seen since the Spanish Flu. What are projects but a product of their time and circumstance? I applaud The Phaistos Project for trying to create a time capsule of the anthropocene, and I think it's even more appropriate that they chose for it to be digitally based.
Screengrab of The Phaistos Project main page; check out the page dedicated to my project here.
Pune Dracker, a writer and contributor to The Phaistos project in 2019, wrote a poem inspired by my symbols. You can see more of their words about their process and inspiration here.
