The method, called mycography, involves growing organisms in a darkroom on agar plates. The use of UV light helped the students “draw” the three-part series, which is called The Climate Chronicles: Images of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
Depicting three images of the Anthropocene era, the students say the technique is a perfect metaphor: control over the final outcome is limited, just as the climate crisis will create uncontrollable conditions for humanity.
The first mycograph depicts Monk by the Sea, an 1810 painting that was made before the effects of the industrial revolution became evident on the environment. The second mycograph recreates a photo taken during the 2021 wildfires in Greece, while the third was created with input from artificial intelligence and shows a ruined city with crumbling skyscrapers.
“Climate Chronicles offers a sobering look at unbridled growth and the concept of ‘progress for the sake of progress,” Professor Devon Ward tells designboom. “It also offers three distinct examples of how our relationship to the environment has changed: from the fear and awe of the natural sublime in the 19th Century to the horror of the Anthropocene in the 20th Century, and to the eco-anxiety about our unknown future in the 21st Century. But the future is not set in stone and the final image does not have to be our fate.”