Re-animating Climate Change: Abstract Temporalities in Augmented Reality

Abstract

This article explores how animation and augmented reality (AR) can create compression and re-distribution of moving image to convey the temporal scales at play in climate change. Animation inherently fosters experimentation with the expression and understanding of time. AR combines the temporal quality of animation with the physical environment, creating a hybrid space of moving image, technology and physical objects that operate on different time scales. This presents an opportunity to engage imaginatively with aspects of climate change that science communication research has identified as problematic to comprehend, such as the immense timescale on which it occurs. My practice-based research explores techniques, including limited animation, AR image targets and layering of two-dimensional moving image in physical space, to demonstrate how these ideas can be implemented both in a gallery and in the natural environment.