September: Orange (in progress, 2026) is a three-channel immersive video installation that combines 24 Cascadia timelapse videos gathered from Phenocam cameras across the region. The Phenocam network is a system of RGB cameras installed on remote sensing research towers around the world, and the images gathered by these cameras are used by scientists who look at color data to learn about the state and health of a landscape. Informed by this research process, I have translated each frame of the timelapse videos into 10-color palettes that represent the 10 most common colors in each photograph, abstracting the landscape into a color field. In September: Orange, I manually sort the grid of sequences to find moments of color unity, when the landscapes all turn the same color.

I have a particular interest in the orange that regularly emerges in September throughout Cascadia, representing the color changes caused by yearly wildfire. Orange appears again and again, with increasing intensity, and floods the screens with evidence of smoke and heat. Significantly, one of the towers used in my project, Ameriflux US-Me2, burned in a wildfire during summer of 2020.

This work is made possible by the L.L. Stewart Fellowship, in collaboration with Dr. Christopher Still, Professor of Forest Ecology and Society at Oregon State University, through the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts. This project is also supported by FLUXNET supported by the National Science Foundation’s Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) program, Award 2113978.

Images used in this video were provided by the PhenoCam Network, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) network which is supported by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Northeastern States Research Cooperative, and the USA National Phenology Network. Special thanks to the PhenoCam Network collaborators, including site PIs and technicians, for publicly sharing the data that were used in this video.