A tropism is a biological term defined as the turning of all or part of an organism in a particular direction in response to an external stimulus. Examples of tropism include phototropism (response to light), chemotropism (response to particular substances), hydrotropism (response to water), thigmotropism (response to touch), traumatotropism (response to wound lesion), and electrotropism (response to electric current). Anemotropism refers to an organism's orientation in response to a current of air or wind.
Anemotropism (or this project’s shorthand, “AT”) feels like a fitting title for this experimental web project as this is a space to reflect on how broad understanding (or misunderstanding) of climate and environmental issues is shaped by currents of information, data, and stories that are “in the air.”
[Above: Current wind patterns around the United States]
AT Feed Process
- Source current environmental news headlines
Current headlines are pulled via RSS feeds1 from top news websites, focusing on feeds that are as specific to climate and environmental news coverage as possible.2 The landing page of this website posts current, unaltered feeds, and this list is automatically updated as each source updates. This organization offers an opportunity to compare content, tone, and coverage from a variety of news sources all in one place. - Generate a lead headline using text-based AI
Once a week, the current list of environmental headlines are dumped into ChatGPT3 with the instruction to consider the content of all headlines and generate one summary news story at a max length of 4000 characters. A second instruction asks ChatGPT to write 20 associated headlines for the summary story it created. From this list, one is selected to be the "lead headline" for the weekly AT Feed story. - Generate a lead image using image-based AI
The ChatGPT-generated "lead headline" is then fed as a prompt into Midjourney4 to create an associated AI-generated image. The AI-generated image is used as reference material to create a hand-drawn illustration. - Interpret the AI-generated image by way of a hand-drawn illustration
Illustrations are hand-drawn/painted interpretations of the AI-generated image, or the tailend “human receipt” of all AI-processed information. The medium and style of these illustrations varies, but most are created on vellum-surfaced paper with a base layer of painted goauche with pen and ink hatched on top. Drawings are then scanned for digital publication. - Who is Chatty Geppetto? The name “Chatty Geppetto” evolved from an affectionate nickname for ChatGPT. Chatty Geppetto appears in the footnotes of each AT Feed post to provide something of an “energy nutrition label,” attempting to assign calculations of carbon emissions produced by each process. There is a lot unaccounted for in Chatty Geppetto’s work, however, and this should be considered an informal estimate. Chatty Geppetto aims to learn more and is working to improve these calculations in the future.
- Publish the AT Feed
The AT Feed is published biweekly on Wednesdays on ArtBlog. Subscribe to their excellent newsletter to follow along and to keep up with all of the great creative happenings in Philadelphia. The AT Feed is also updated every other on Thursday on this website and on Instagram.
Author
The AT Feed is a project by Philadelphia-based illustrator and designer Sarah Kaizar.⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚⋆｡°✩ ⋆⁺｡˚⋆˙‧₊✩₊‧˙⋆˚｡⁺⋆ ✩°｡⋆⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧
1 RSS feeds (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) are web feeds that allow users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators (or "RSS readers") can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.
2 Many news websites offer streams of their content via RSS, but some do not. Some sources offer environmental or climate-specific RSS feeds, and some offer feeds with related content organized under broader titles like “Science.” Is there a feed missing on this website? Email me.
3 ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that uses natural language processing to create humanlike conversational dialogue. The language model can respond to questions and compose various written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code and emails.
4 Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that allows users to generate unique artwork such as characters, images and depictions through short text prompts.