Cristina Gaitán’s thesis focuses on enabling a sense of ecological imagination in the urban population of San Francisco. She examines water systems as a typology of natural systems, seeking to make massive scales and systems legible at human scale. The body of work is a collection of discrete performative objects, deployed as interventions into public and private urban space. By designing disjunctive moments of noticing, the work asks people to investigate their relationship, understanding and connection to the natural networks that surround them.
Our perception has myopically evolved to perceive only a limited scope of the scales of time and space, creating dissonance in matters of interpreting ideas of larger terrestrial and celestial systems. We have created technologies that reach far beyond our narrow existential understanding of the world, and how things are interconnected. The ambition of Ecological Imaginations is the development of processes to (re)connect people to the earth, one another, and the self.