Sweksha Sinha is an MFA Graduate from the Design and Technology program at the Parsons School of Design. For her senior thesis Sweksha created a virtual reality experience exploring the relationship between of climate change and the rapid rate in which technology is advancing.
Moving towards the dream, are we? is an immersive speculative experience that confronts the implications of both sea-level rise and our over-reliance on advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to create solutions for climate change. The purpose of this project is to highlight the drastic impacts of rising sea levels due to climate change in the near future and communicate the importance of ethical use of technology, while raising awareness of our over-dependence on artificial intelligence to solve climate problems- the problem to which, ironically, it is one of the biggest contributors.
New York being a coastal city is most threatened by rising sea levels due to global warming, with projections of 18 to 50 inches increase in sea levels by the end of the century. The project focuses on studying and confronting the impacts of flooding in New York City to get an in-depth understanding of the severity of the impending changes in the near future, with analysis into one of the biggest contributors to the root cause of the global crisis.
Moving towards the dream, are we? is a speculative world design to portray loss due to sea-level rise, employing what Jacques Derrida termed a “philosophy of hauntology” to create shock value and to trigger a sense of “solastalgia”, nostalgia due to terrain lost to climate change.