Blog Post 7 - Tram

       This visit to JPL was very different than our last visit since it felt like we were in one room most of the time we were there. The focus for this session was focused on Julia Christensen’s “Tree of Life” project. It is a 200-year-old piece that will be a collect and track tree and the sound or song they produce. Honestly, this project is still very confusing, and many questions are still left unanswered. I understand that being able to hear the tree’s song sounds super cool, but as a collective whole, I don’t know why humanity and people should care. Or even how to get them to care about a project that lots of taxpayer money are going towards. Not to undermind the project but creating a project in response to the Tree of Life. While I am still confused about the intention of the Tree of Life, meeting the team and brainpower behind the project was excellent. It was refreshing to be part of the process and see the project in the beginning stages, and I can’t wait to see where the project goes.
       During the lecture and after the pizza, I was interested in the lecture about the travel poster for the various moons and planets by Dan Goods. The concept and how the poster blew up was so funny, and it was something that I was more interested in being an artist and graphic design but still having that element and sense of play. I resonated with his lecture a lot more since I could see how my art and graphic design background can play into jobs such as these. And while the poster was still scientifically accurate, there was room for creative freedom and humor, which is very much what my art is too.
      Similarly, when I was trying to come up with an artistic project to respond to the Tree of Life, my mind went straight to creating some graphics. My first thought was to create a comic book, some story to tell. How do I tell the journey of this tree and his song? How do I get people interested in this project and how to represent it in a way that makes me excited visually. Ultimately I was stuck on this post-apocalyptic view that the tree would need to migrate to a new planet. But from the feedback in the think tank, some people voiced that they would like to see that there is still hope and life on Earth, 200 years.
Image result for space poster nasa

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