(un)grounded

an interdisciplinary arts project

Stanford University, Honors in the Arts capstone series, one year team project

About the Project

The Honors in the Arts program, offered by the Stanford Arts Institute, is an opportunity for students to pursue a yearlong interdisciplinary capstone project that goes beyond the traditional boundaries of their major. (un)grounded is an interdisciplinary, mixed-media group project that uses photography, maps, digital collage, and text from interviews to highlight people’s experiences with environmental change in places they’re intimately familiar with, as well as explore human connection to place and how that relationship is impacted by a changing environment.

The Inspiration

(un)grounded came about after many conversations with my friend and project partner, Vrinda Suresh, about climate change, environmental issues, and the general state of the world. While it originally was proposed as an art piece tackling eco-anxiety, it quickly evolved into a series of works highlighting people’s experiences with environmental change and memory, connection to place, solastalgia, and emotional displacement.

By collaging satellite maps of environmental change with portraits and imagery, we dive into the lived experiences so often erased and overlooked in quantitative treatments of environmental change. We explore how these changes can creep up on us, making what once was considered normal a thing of the past, and things once considered shocking seem unremarkable. How has environmental change affected us all, and why should we care?

User Interviews

This project focuses on highlighting the stories of people, so we spent a couple weeks developing and sending out a survey to gather participants as well as creating an outline for each interview. While we had a set list of questions, we also added in tailored questions for each participant based off of their survey responses and held an informal format, allowing us to deviate from the rigid question-and-answer to allow us to have a more organic, free-flowing conversation.

Portrait Photography

After we had interviewed our participants, we invited each one for a photoshoot to create the base for their portraits. One of our biggest struggles, being new to portrait photography, was getting participants to look natural in the photos — many people have a specific face or pose that they gravitate toward, but we needed to convey very specific emotions for each shoot. Our mentor and professional photographer, Amy Welkins, gave us many tips and tricks to help us make our participants feel more comfortable and relax into the poses that we wanted.

Collaging

The next step was to turn each interview into a set of collaged portraits. Using any source photos gathered from the participants themselves as well as self-gathered photos, we created specific collages that conveyed both the place they talked about in their interviews as well as the emotions that they felt and the changes they described.

Each series of portraits was also collaged with a map of the environmental change that they were describing. By using maps specifically, we wanted to highlight the way that maps can flatten and depersonalize information. In doing so, we question the idea of scientific objectivity while grounding the abstract nature of maps in an individual story.

We then pulled quotes from each interview and paired them with the photos to better tell each story.

Creating the Website

In order to create the website, we first created a mockup on Figma. After deciding on a very simple user flow and color palette, we experimented with different layouts that would create the best pacing for each series of collages.

After a full mockup on figma, I created the final website in webflow.

Final Product

Along with the final website, we also created a video essay for the Honors in the Arts virtual symposium. While the website has since been archived, the final figma prototype can be viewed here.

This project was the recipient of the 2022 Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Art.