Sydney Keller

Introduction
Intrigued by the haunting, but eerily beautiful colors corals can take on when affected by warming waters due to climate change, I created a picture essay using parametric design to highlight this phenomenon.

This was my first time working with Rhino/Grasshopper and parametric design, so I had a lot of fun playing around with shapes, parameters, textures, and lighting.

I wanted to present this project as a case study, starting with the current neon colored corals, and then progressing to a more and more abstract version of these corals throughout the essay, and possibly envisioning what they might look like should this situation worsen and waters continue to warm. I decided to place the corals suspended mid air in a blank corner with dramatic lighting to really emphasize the feeling of viewing them in a museum or exhibition environment, to convey researching or studying this climate event through these pieces of coral.

References
Chasing Coral. United States: Netflix, 2017.

Lewis, Sophie. “Dying Coral Reefs Turn Vibrant Neon Colors in Apparent Last-Ditch Effort to Survive.” CBS News, May 22, 2020. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dying-coral-reefs-colorful-bleaching-survival-effort-climate-change/.

US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “How Does Climate Change Affect Coral Reefs?” NOAA’s National Ocean Service, March 3, 2015. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralreef-climate.html#:~:text=Climate%20change%20dramatically%20affects%20coral%20reef%20ecosystems&text=A%20warming%20ocean%3A%20causes%20thermal,land%2Dbased%20sources%20of%20sediment.