Hi my name is Daniel and I am a senior in the Art Education Department at MassArt.
I use both art and science to bring attention to contemporary environmental issues that are affecting the planet.
Some of my current work engages with Speculative Evolution, with a focus on using climate change data and evolutionary biology to speculate how human's devastating behavior will change species in the distant future.
I am compiling this work into a what I hope someday can be a published book. For the Cambridge Science Festival I will continue this model.
Massospora cicadina is a fungal pathogen that infects 13 to 17 year periodical cicadas. Spores from this parasitic fungi overwhelm and replace the abdomen of cicadas, leading to altered sexual behavior, infertility, disease, and eventual death.
For this project I will be looking at what conditions allow this fungi to thrive, and hypothesize in what ways changing conditions could cause this organism to evolve.
My goal is to have designed a fully realized, speculative organism in the future that can trace its ancestral roots back to Massospora cicadina. This will take the form of an illustration of this proposed organism accompanied by scientific-adjacent text.