Digital media artist Andrea Polli focuses her attention on the climate changes occurring around the world. Polli recently spent two months in Antarctica learning more about the situation. She began this semester as the director of the Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media Program. The Daily Lobo caught up to her for an interview while she was working in Australia.
Daily Lobo: What types of documentaries have you worked on?
Andrea Polli: My personal work has been involved in media related to the environment, and I have done work related to the Arctic and Antarctic. I did some work in Taiwan and a lot of projects in New York related to the environment.
DL: Was your work trying to bring awareness to these environmental issues, or was it a conservation type of thing?
AP: For my own personal work, I think I was trying to help people understand. I'm particularly focused on climate change, and I think one of the big problems with people taking action on climate change is actually understanding what it is and how it is, because there is so much uncertainty around climate change. For example, we have a cold winter and people say, 'Oh, well, there's no climate change, because it's cold out right now.' So, I have been trying to interview scientists and kind of tease up some of the understanding of the science for the laymen. I mean, I'm not a scientist, so it's kind of nice. I can try to understand it and translate that just for the general public. That's mainly what I have been trying to do - help people try to understand and appreciate their climate and their weather in general, and, hopefully that will make people take some action.
DL: Why Antarctica?
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
AP: I had been doing a lot of stuff with weather and climate scientists, and I learned about the accelerated warming that's happening in the Arctic, so I did a project related to the North Pole, and that naturally got me interested in both poles. Then I learned that there was an opportunity through the Natural Science Foundation to actually go to Antarctica, so that was really the reason.
DL: How long were you in Antarctica?
AP: I was there for about two months.
DL: Did you see any climate changes happen while you were there?
AP: There was a lot of melting going on while I was there, and that is part of the normal process in the summer, when it's light 24/7. I did speak to some scientists about some of the things that were happening and basically in the area of Antarctica I was - in the East Antarctic area. At the time I was there, there was not the kind of warming that the other side of Antarctica was seeing, but that's actually changed this year. There has been more evidence of warming even in East Antarctica. What was interesting was interviewing the scientists about their work, and one of the scientists had his work taken over by Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh as evidence that there is no global warming, because this scientist was studying a very small part of Antarctica and was showing that it was cooling. I interviewed this scientist, because he had written an op-ed in the New York Times saying, 'No, there actually is global warming and my research is being taken out of context by the politicos.' I had a really interesting interview with him, again trying to help people understand that just because one part of the earth might be cooling, that doesn't mean that there isn't an overall problem.
