Climate Momentum Seed Funds

Can a videogame help adolescents practice community organizing skills that lead to climate action? This grant will allow us to answer this question by funding the development of a game called Tempest UnEarthed featuring Afrofuturist world-building, climate justice themes, and cutting-edge climate communications research.

The game will be a sequel to Kai UnEarthed (https://www.kaiunearthed.com/), which Olivia and Matthew will release in summer 2023, based on anti-racist environmental justice activism. Both games are set in a future where fossil fuels and systemic racism have been abolished and people called wildtenders help the Earth heal from the effects of climate change. In Tempest UnEarthed, players engage with Tempest, a gender non-conforming Black teenager who learned to become a wildtender in Kai UnEarthed; she is now undergoing a ritual where she imagines the experiences of her ancestors in the 2020s, including players of the game.

Through a 2D side-scroller point-and-click adventure, players will help Tempest explore places in Southern California that are dealing with environmental racism and extreme weather, looking for artifacts with information about these issues and how people are navigating them. Players will use this information to converse with diverse characters in ways that motivate them to take action for climate justice. They will also use an analog journal that comes with the game to reflect on how Tempest and her liberated society might remember the actions they take to make her world possible.We will design the game for adolescents to use in after-school programs. It will run for free on Chromebooks and similar devices, in web browsers with no download required. It will be a part of a larger curriculum that our team is designing, which will include a live theater role-playing game and a workshop where students will design their own climate justice games.

Conference of Fire (CoF) aims to examine wildfires in the American West and their impact on the physical and mental health of local communities. Designed to be a collaboration between community members and a creative and scholarly team from USC, CoF’s goal is to take a multifaceted look at wildfires, which have grown in intensity and frequency due to climate change.

Using a collaborative process, CoF will devise an artistic project rooted in research that demonstrates the nature of fire through:

• its function in the environment and in human life;
• its mythological/spiritual aspects;
• its biology;
• the principles of fire management;
• the health challenges caused by breathing in smoke and ash;
• the trauma caused by evacuating and/or losing property and loved ones.

This will allow for a complex understanding of fire that avoids a superficial response and encourages action toward creating improved land use and wildfire policies, as well as clean water/air regulations to safeguard the health of our planet and population.

In 2024, we will utilize an initial round of grant funding from the USC Center for Children’s Environmental Health Research Translation to convene CoF stakeholders for a daylong retreat on the USC campus. At this session we will begin a project development process based on participants’ expertise and research conducted by CoF research assistants.

Through presentations and discussion we will explore the concepts outlined above. The group will then take steps toward defining and making a public-facing creative response that yields a greater understanding of wildfires, extreme weather, climate change and solutions with a specific focus on the impacts on children’s health. Possible creative outcomes might include live performance, film, poetry, installation art, educational toolkits, or a hybrid of these. At the end of the session, we will present a prototype to an invited audience.

We are proposing an interdisciplinary “think tank” focused on climate storytelling in the performing arts. In Fall 2024, a group of 6-8 students selected from the Kaufman, Thornton, and Dornsife Schools will be invited to participate in a series of focused discussions and learning events on issues and solutions related to climate change, including a guided, 3-day trip to the Wrigley Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island and a visit to the AltaSea campus at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. During this trip, students will learn first-hand about ongoing coastal research at the Wrigley Institute and at AltaSea and engage with scientists on topical environmental and sustainability issues such as aquaculture, carbon management, habitat restoration, and native biodiversity. The group will also consider both sites and their contrasting environs – one superbly pristine and one resoundingly industrial – as inspiration toward and possible venues for related performance-based projects.

The project will culminate in the mentorship and production of 2-3 performance-based works or presentations in Spring 2025 (venues TBD; exploring possibilities on Catalina Island, UPC campus, AltaSea facilities).

The goal is to spark a culture of playful, innovative, creative processes and collaborations between artists and researchers, prioritizing risk-taking and robust engagement with science over a polished final product.