Coexisting as Becoming

This project aims to raise reflection about the potential rise of water levels, considering, according to the Swedish portal Sea Level Rise, it would rise up to 65 meters in case all remaining ice in the world would melt.

It wouldn’t happen out of the sudden, but, if we did not see a pandemic coming, which other forces are we neglecting in this human supremacy? If here we approach the issue from the Post Humanist perspective, how can multispecies coexist on a context of potential catastrophe?

As an attempt to answer that question, through research a dossier of references was created, composed since methods of survival (like building floating houses, like they do in Amazon) until songs and other artists inputs, as methods for learning to stay with the problem and look at it from a caring & beyond-than-human angle.

Considering the lack of facilities to create a physical object in this current moment of social distancing where workshops are closed, and considering that water perhaps is not in need of it, the revolution I thought was mine to make relies on a digital intervention. It consists on three instagram filters. aiming to popularise the subject between the digital human and younger audience.

The intention is to channel attention to the non-human and hopefully reflections about our lack of control in relation to the unknown’s force.

They all address water movement. One is called “onda leva”, which means “wave washing away” in Portuguese and it has ocean water movement on the background, and the user’s face outline is soft, easily dissolving into the background.

The second one is called “become sparkly ocean”, where the movement of the water with the reflection of the sun is a transparent layer on top of the user.

The last one is called “rising water level” where literally water is rising and making the user disappear underneath it in a playful way.

The filters got a good response from the audience, that spread quickly from my original 1270 followers. The best response came from the filter become sparkly ocean, then onda leva and, lastly, rising water level. In two months they have reached an amount of 23.800 impressions.

Making a project that stays digital is a contemporary way of not creating any waste - which has been my concern throughout my entire design practice. I don’t like the idea of creating a tangible object that is useful just for a short amount of time and then thrown away. This way, the project remains available until further notice.

Project made during the free-standing course Design and the Post-Humanist Perspective at HDK, spring term 2020.