NATURE EMBEDDED - A Design Technology Experience

Nature Restored

The story of :
Nature's Evolution, Extinction,
Restoration and the Human's
Journey
- a walkthrough in the form of floor graphics and mural:

We inhabit a world of 'sentient' beings – entities with life forms. That includes the world of plants. The problem arises when we begin to look at the world from an "anthropocentric" view, viz., from the point of view of the human alone, and creating fissures in the ecology. This fractured viewpoint, which is that of the 'modern' man's, coexists with another universe, viz., that of the 'indigenous' where the former assumes that 'the world belongs to Man', while the latter believes that 'Man belongs to the world' This, then, gets reflected in a language and phrasing such as 'our world', 'our mountains' or even 'our wildlife' that ends up sub-texting the modern communication idiom.

'Nature Restored' is a cautionary tale of Man's excesses, where the floor graphics start with the journey of species as footprints of living beings on the garden of earth through the steps of time, only to be met with the destructive nature of Man's tendencies and marked by the unfortunate elimination and exhaustion of life forms that were of either extractive value or simply an irritant to one's existence.
Until it reached a point in time when the Human became supreme even if he was the only life form remaining.
Echoed in the words of the sagely E.O.Wilson from Harvard: "The human hammer having fallen, the sixth mass extinction has begun."

Wilson calls it The Age of Loneliness.
And made even more poignant by the fact that "the first five cycles of extinction of species had taken ten million years to repair by natural evolution. We do not have those ten million years. We will all be extinct by then". Except, within that cycle of extraction, the global human population doubles each time in shorter and shorter intervals.
The tessellated floor graphics, with their endless repetitions and potentially claustrophobic and disorienting human forms, seem well suited to explore ideas of unending growth.