These series of paintings and accumulating video which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxH7gJweHck describe the backstory of Earthman Bob. This is where Bob lives, in a near distant future space station floating above the Earth.

“My name's Bob and this is the Earth.”

“And this is the Earth.”

“Floating up here, above the Earth, it’s our role to cultivate new lines of perspective on old and difficult questions.”

“We do this by realigning our body and minds, with the rhythm inside, with Daisie by our side. Helping us to build a new pattern of co-operation, in the space we mak e between us.”

A visual description of a poem about the Sun and its life and warmth giving qualities.

A piece describing the interconnected of life and technology on the Earth.

A visual description of an augmented artificial intelligence. Exploring the design of this Ai for a new narrative project.

A painting of two lovers lying on a field of daisys in Saint Stephens Green Park in Dublin city on a spring afternoon. Inspired by maps, this piece is about exploring topogrhapircal features in painting.

A semi-abstract impressionist mixed media painting of a gardener in the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin Dublin. The piece explores themes of interconnectivity in nature and technology through patterns and balances in mark making.

Exploring mark making at speed to create the feeling of movement and sounds.

A study of figures lounging on the green in Trinity on a summers day.

Exploring different painting and mark making techniques in this composition.

Describing the Earth from a non-geopolitical and top-down perspective.

Describing the Earth from a non-geopolitcal, top-down perspective.

A scene of a man eating lunch along the canal in portobello. Describing the inter-play between modernity and nature through the use of fluorescent green.

Playing with abstract colour tones and senses of scale.

Imagining Dublin in bright-light.

Imagining Dublin in a brighter light.

Imagining Dublin in a bright light.

Exploring the idea of the complexity and harmony of ecosystems and our place as humans within them.

Re-imagining the advertisements in Rathmines, Dublin.

Exploring abstract patterns in paintings.

In this painting I looked to explore further our relationship with the patterns of consumption that we run off the face of the Earth and decorative patterns. With this series I am looking to draw analogous conclusions between how we treat the Earth and how we relate to forms in an enjoyable way.

This painting was again about exploring the relationship between how humans can sit as minuscule parts of a larger whole but also remain central to the larger whole.

In this painting I chiefly wanted to explore mark making but also wanted to explore further the relationship between human scale and the colossal scale of our Earth. Here represented by men trekking across a vast glacier, they are dwarfed by their surrounds but also central to the image.

Here I have sought to more literally describe the agricultural machine that we run off the face of the Earth. Tying together the forms of patterns that we might decoratively make and the patterns that constitute our vast industrial machine.

As I slowly got back into climate related projects I attended a Post-Cop 21 climate Gathering in Trinity college Dublin. I heard Eamon Ryan, leader of the Green party speak there, he spoke about the importance of narrative and impassioned ways of communicating. 

Visual and emotional effects of branding and advertising have reached toxic levels. As Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book Tipping point , our environmental surroundings affect our behaviour. If Gladwell is right, how are we to convince people to take action on climate when they're being shouted at constantly by 'special offers' telling them to do exactly the opposite?

In times gone by when communication channels were simpler we used propaganda effectively to mobilize social movements for valiant causes.

After the intense experience of Earthman Bob (pt1) I wanted to take a step back from putting myself in the firing line of climate communication and get back to some 2D ways of communicating. I emulated older propaganda and inserted Earthman's poetry to try and counterbalance consumerist language. 

After introducing myself to the Greens they invited me to come work for the party in the run up to the election. It was such a fun experience, most of the staff running the campaign were volunteer 20 something years olds like myself, they cared about the environment they were committed to solutions, progress and they didn't take themselves too seriously, it was brilliant.

I fell into the role of graphic Designer for the Greens' Facebook/ twitter/ instagram. I had never used graphic software before but the greens were extremely open to new ideas and gave me a lot of freedom to mess up and improve. Here are a few snippets of my graphics. 

To understand the posters you have to understand that this picture is representative of every street corner in an irish election season and these are some of the nicer ones. For some reason the conventional thinking amongst politicians goes, to get the votes you must have the picture that's going on the ballot paper up everywhere you can fit it. 

Eamon Ryan then asked me to come up with ideas for some posters communicating climate change in a new way to run alongside the final weeks of the campaign. I went back to my earlier ideas about climate communication and positive propaganda and flushed out several designs. These final three became the posters (bigger pics at the end of the page). 

One of the central ideas first discussed about the posters is that we wanted them to be framed by all the other boring, drab and listless ones. And from the reaction we got it worked.

The most common reaction from people was relief at something different from the norm, something other than the established way of communicating the established party lines. 

(300+ went up mostly in Dublin but also Galway, Waterford, Longford, Cork)

For anyone interested in the reference Material that went into these posters check out greencuts.tumblr.com

This was initially "The Future/ is a place we build together" but Eamon suggested the change to "our home", I think it worked well in the context of the election.

People referenced this poster as their Favourite, encouraging for me as this is the closest sentiment to Earthman Bobs.

After the posters went up and I had a chance to reflect and I came to understand what  each poster meant. I want the Earthman's message to be about these three things told in a million different ways said powerfully and purposefully.

Hopefully the posters helped get the two Green TD's elected to the Dail but for me they also begin to prove a point, that the climate crisis is as much about saving our artificial environments as our natural ones.

Trawling through the twitter feed on election night I came across someone using the Show me love graphic as their Profile picture. I had never thought to use them like that and made me wish I had another run at the campaign with more time. The Show me Love poster got the accolade for the best poster of the election by the Irish Times. But to see it used in a new and novel way, to see others proliferating and expanding Earthman Bob's message. For me that was the most encouraging thing from the project.

The above graph is lifted form Stephen Emmotts powerful book Ten Billion. This project began in earnest when Mr Emmott addressed our class of 2nd year uni students and told us all in pleasent but no uncertain terms.

"I think we're fucked"

The overview effect has been the single most important reference I have drawn upon in this project. After watching this video countless times and reading through Frank Whites book "the overview effect: space exploration and human evolution".

I became (and still am) inspired and fascinated by these astronauts testimony. Hearing and reading about how their perspectives changed after seeing the Earth from this viewpoint convinced me that lying within this experience was the key to changing how we discuss the environment and humanity's future in a wider world.

The overview effect has a wide ranging affect upon the viewer but for the sake of my specific agenda I sought the sentiments most relevant to the enviromental crisis.

"I think a better crew for better flights should be a poet, a philosopher and a preist... we might get a much better idea of what we saw" - Micahel Collins (pictured)

Astronauts are not versed in the ways of communicating experiences such as the overview effect in the reverberating ways needed. I therefore have placed myself as the poet Collins talked about and set about writing a poem.

In my research I became fascinated by how rhetoric had been used before to create new compulsions to defy the odds, to mobilize and to inspire millions into a positive frame of mind.

Rhetoric is not enough to overcome the odds but it can provide a new framework of understanding and perception that make great challenges less challenging.

I set about constructing a new persona for my new perspective.

To adopt a new view point I created a character Earthman Bob and designed a space suit for earthman Bob to embody his ideals and perspectives. Using Tapa cloth inspired by Kathy Kjiner of the Marshall islands and her poetic address to the united nations on climate change. The suit is also a reupholstered motor cycle jacket, attempting to mimic the form of MIT researchers futuristic 'second skin' design ideas for future space suits.

To understand what the environmental crisis meant to others I spent many hours talking with Teachers, environmentalists, engineers, artists, academics, my peers, anyone I could get my hands on to try and gain a new perspective on their understanding of where the environmental crisis lay. 

It became very apparent to me through those countless conversations and discussions that when people discuss the environment what they are actually talking about are their hopes and beliefs for our species' future.

And it was a relentlessly negative experience, almost too negative to be true, as if people were actively trying to believe the world was doomed. As if the apocalypse was preferable to a bright future, as if the certainty of doom was better than hoping for the best. 

But this was just a story people told themselves and stories can change.

So I crafted a poem about a man looking down from one angel and up from another, with instructions therein to look up and try to see the same. 

The poem is my version of an antidote to climate chaos. I began performing it to people to try and powerfully re-enforce their ability to believe in a better future, to try and break the taboo of hoping for the best environment possible, culturally as much as naturally. 

The final poem can be found online

medium.com/@robertjfitz

My hope is that Earthman Bob will give people room to breathe amongst all the damned news and opinion that gets thrown at them daily about the environment. I hope then people use that breathing space to form their own narratives and use their own skills to change the story of our environmental crisis.

"To War!!" is far to serious a phrase to use next to a picture of a man in a space skirt but it's on purpose. During the second and first world war we banded together to fight a common enemy. 

We ate less, drove less, learnt how to grow our own food, we learnt new skills and educated ourselves specifically to address the evil of tyranny and oppression. We need to do that again only bigger. If we are going to do this and save the world we need to get better at telling stories, ones about what we stand to gain from the end of the old world and how great we will have to become to solve this crisis.

Aeroplane spotting

 Fred (17) had been spotting planes since 8, in an interview with him he told me how he was interested in where each plane was from and where they were going.

I tried to imagine a world where aeroplane spotting was as interesting to me as is was to the spotters themselves. I imagined a world where each plane had a name, a destination and a unique decoration. I wanted to see these planes in the sky as those spotters do.

On one of my trips to Heathrow a low flying A380 passed over head. The thunderous reverberation of the noise around me and the presence of this colossal beast in the sky struck a nerve with me. Seeing this behemoth pass over head made me think of it as not a plane at all but more like a living flying whale in the sky

As apart of my process I travelled to the V & A to weave a fictional history of this envisioned world where aeroplanes had become so engrained in our world it was as if they were animals.

Starting in medieval Japan, through europe in the dark ages, britain at the dawn of the industrial revolution and ending in a dystopian future. I created a fictional world and stories therein to further engross myself in this hypothetical reality.

But what made the lasting impression on me was this idea of living breathing whales floating and flying around our world. A form of transportation that had ceased to be just about getting form A to B but also had begun to evolve a sort of consciousness and found a way to inhabit the earth independent of humanity. If the technology that inhabits and surrounds us began to evolve new ways of functioning how would our relationship with that technology change? This posed some questions to me, what does the world look like to a passenger of a whale in the sky?

What would we make of a world, shown to us by a consciousness we helped create, look like?

One of the outcomes for this brief was a short video illustrating what it might be like to ride on one of these whales of the sky. How do we perceive the world below? Does this new perspective, on the back of a flying whale, change our view of our home?

Observing the repressive architectures and systems of a city to better understand how to navigate an escape route for our primal selves. 

We stood upon a hill and screamed our lungs out. These initial expressions of emotion were the platform of escape we built upon. These initial screams led us to question such as where do screams have more of an affect and visa versa? Do our screams need a stage?

Our research led us to the Lars Von Trier film 'the idiots', where a group of young idealists attempt to subvert class and social structures by 'spassing out'.

We took our screaming to the streets in an effort to transcend those social restrictions and to understand better how our screams have an affect on others.

We looked to how emotion was built up and released in films.

Exploring how we could have a visual representation of our primal selves. We experimented with processing and a projector, creating a programme that responds and visualizes our screams.

Through our exstensive iterations and experimentations with our primal selves we formed a strong bond within our group. We saw ourselves as emotional pioneers, hopefully paving the way for others to feel as if they could express their inner selves.