World Building Article - Gravity Shift Article 3

The Old Country Tribune

Seeing the Good in the Gravity Shift of ‘86

By Zach Connell     March 14, 2016

 

Frightened Crowd during the 86' Gravity Shift.

As we look back over years, many disastrous Gravity Shifts have interrupted our peaceful lives and for some people has ended their lives. Toady marking the 30^th anniversary of the great Gravity Shift of ’86, now is the time to remember and honor the lives lost during that tragic event. Though on a more positive note, not everyone was negatively affected by the gravity shift. One couple recalls the ‘adventure’ they had that presented them the opportunity to meet and fall in love. After meeting with them, the Redfords, I have come to realize how deeply they honor and respect that day.

The morning of, Mr. Redford got in his car and drove to work. Since he works as a nurse for the hospital, he was greatly needed to help with all the injured people that were coming in. Noticing that his wheels were not getting much traction on the ground, he decided to grab the sand bags in his garage and place them in the trunk of his Toyota. After twelve 50lb bags he was finally able to get his car to rest on the ground the way it should. “I remember seeing animals, trash, and even people stuck on lamp posts and signs. They must have accidently jumped too high, or taken too big of a step that just launched them off the ground. It was really dangerous, and looking back I don’t get why I didn’t realize that I needed to be more safe” Mr. Redford remarks about his trip to work. It’s truly devastating knowing that the people who disappear on those days died as a result of floating up into the abyss.

Mrs. Redford looked out her window on the same morning and thought to herself that she would stay safely inside for the day after hearing about how light the gravity was. However, she was swayed when she saw her cat Sprinkles stuck in a tree, feet dangling above with its claws jabbed into the bark holding on for dear life. “I ran outside to desperately help my poor Sprinkles. The unfortunate thing was that I myself started to rise into the air with each step I took. I was risking my life to save my cat, probably not the smartest decision, but I would hate to see Sprinkles succumb to the weightlessness and float up to heaven. Why Sprinkles was outside in the first place I have no idea” Mrs. Redford remarked.

All of this happened as Mr. Redford was driving by. “I saw a pretty looking girl struggling to get to a tree with an almost floating cat, so naturally I had to stop.” Serendipitously for the both of them, he did stop and helped out his future love. Both individuals remarked in our interview about how fate can be a funny, and slightly ironic thing. They each saw an opportunity to make a frightening situation into a positive memory.

After listening to the story of this lovely couple, I realized how maybe everything does happen for a reason. The grass is green, Christmas comes once every year, indisputable these facts are as the gravity shifts we experience every day. The only way to get through it is to keep a happy face and move along.

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Artist Statement

Juan Rodriguez
Nathan Tanner
Addison Hunsaker
Zach Connell

What if we lived in a world where the gravitational force on Earth was variant from one day to another in the same way the weather fluctuates? After some discussion, we realized that such a world would have a lot of implications in comparison to the world we currently live in. Taking in consideration that some days the gravity would be strong enough to gives us a hard time to move around while some other days it would reach such low levels to allows us to float around as if we were on the moon, our buildings would have to be designed in a different way, we would dress differently to adapt to those weight shifts, and we would have perhaps new ways to exercise under such variant conditions. Most importantly, we would have to find ways to work whether those gravitational changes occur or not.

That being said, in this world, people would be more sedentary than nomadic. On heavy days, people would stay home and work from there. Telecommuting would be extremely popular, thus, increasing the amount of people doing business online. This would force the government to put more security in the cybernetic world than real life. Law enforcements wouldn’t be as popular on the streets since most crimes would occur online. Hackers would be as common as we hear robberies in our current world. If required, the government would have access to people’s information in order to track maleficent users. Meanwhile, hackers would constantly find new ways to bypass and avoid government's security patrols. This would create a world where people got used to being surveilled, while at the same time, not being too concerned because they would believe that they are being protected. On the other hand, some regular people wouldn’t agree to the idea of having limited privacy; therefore, some people would create softwares to browse the web anonymously.

In Bleeker’s “Design Fiction,” he not only talks about how design fictions should create functional, interesting materials, but that the design fiction process should derive from a good story. So rather than just creating a world where the gravitational pulls shifted like the weather, we imagined what life would be like for the people who lived in this unexpected and inconsistent world. What would they live in? What kind of sports or games would they play? What was their history like and what stories would they see on the news? What would they wear?