A Joint Visual Interpretation Into Today’s Phenology (2024)
Collaborative Film Project, Climate Section, Across RCA, 2min 56 sec, Produced with digital software such as TouchDesigner, Photoshop and Blender, Photo Archives, and Sound.
Role: Contributed digital artwork depicting cherry blossoms and the moment of flowering and Fruiting in the context of plant phenology.
Artist Note
Beginning with the phenomenon of Seoul’s cherry blossoms blooming 14 days earlier than in the past, this digital film visually explores the impact of climate change on plant phenology. Created as an interdisciplinary practice through collaboration between Yonghun Kim, Arno Ivaldi, Wiktoria Witczak, Kaixu Jiang, and Soyeon Jung at the Royal College of Art’s AcrossRCA Climate Section, this work addresses the reality of ecosystem’s delicate balance being disrupted as flowering times are accelerated due to rising temperatures and increased sunlight hours. This film compresses the entire life cycle of plants into a single narrative as a digital media project. Utilizing various digital tools including Touch Designer and Blender, it visualizes key stages of plant phenology such as flowering, fruiting, seedling, leaf changing, and leaf falling.
This film goes beyond simple environmental awareness to explore the interrelationship between human and non-human life forms. By approaching the ecological ripple effects brought about by climate change at the intersection of art and technology, it enables audiences to recognize the urgency of environmental change on both emotional and intellectual levels. While the early blooming of cherry blossoms may appear to be a beautiful phenomenon, it actually signifies the disruption of synchronization between flowers and pollinating insects, and the cascading collapse of ecosystem networks.
Particularly, through the process of weaving individual videos together using Adobe Firefly, the work emphasizes the irony of environmental conservation lagging behind in an era of technological advancement, and paradoxically utilizes AI—a symbol of progress and development—to imprint upon audiences the eeriness of environmental change and the fear it may evoke.
Artist Role and Contribution
In this collaborative project, I created three distinct digital artworks: the opening sequence, Flowering, and the Fruiting stages of plant phenology.
Opening Sequence: Developed a rotating digital cherry tree that establishes the conceptual and visual foundation for the entire collaborative video narrative
Flowering Sequence: Created digital visualization capturing the accelerated blooming patterns using Touch Designer’s noise and blur nodes to represent the dreamlike disruption of natural seasonal cycles.
Fruiting Sequence: Produced the fruiting stage visualization that continues the phenological narrative, bridging the gap between bloom and harvest cycles affected by climate change.
Cherry Blossom Tree
Process of Making Cherry Blossom Tree
Flowering Part
Process of Making Flowering Part
Fruiting Part
Process of Making Fruiting Part