Music

Hello, welcome to Planet Classroom. I am Orb. Join me as your virtual guide on a journey of global learning called Planet Classroom.

You will hear stories from artists, musicians, dancers, technologists, game makers, film makers, innovators and creators of all kinds from around the world.

It's time to engage or imagine nations, share our ideas and explore solutions for a brighter future for all.

Our planet is a classroom where learning together brings us together.

Icelandic nature is fragile. That's a very well-known fact.

We can see visible erosion because of tourist numbers and things like that. So it kind of goes without saying that that means that we have to manage tourism in a more strict way.

We have to have zoning roles and more strict entrants in some places and monitor numbers.

But culture is as important. Tourism is not only a business, it's also about cultural extience.

Tourism can mean a tense and local culture, both in a very positive and also negative way.

What lessons can the world learn from Iceland about globalization, the acclaimed documentary, Scaling Iceland by Adam Herkaronitas, brings together geophysicists, musicians, folklorists, fishermen, geneticists and young people to share their stories on Iceland's geological, biological and cultural history.

They discuss their hopes and dreams for their country's future. What happens when global warming causes glaciers to melt? What happens when people make their home in a detached land?

How will Iceland integrate foreign influences and hold on to her identity?

My name is Adam Herkaronitas, I'm from San Diego, California, and Budapest, Hungary, and I'm on Planet Classroom.

What inspired me to create this film was an attempt to combine my interests in art and science. I've always been really inspired by the photographic work of Jan Arthus Bertrand and his book Earth from Above, which just captured my imagination with its aerial imagery of the world ever since I was a kid.

Then Mishka Kornai's film Growth from 2015 explores the universality of growing up in different parts of the planet and the way that they filmed the subjects there solely from the sky above.

Those were both direct sources of inspiration visually.

And then while I was studying neuroscience as an undergrad at Brown University, I recognized that the maps of the human genome are uncannily similar visually to the construction of Iceland's road system with Route 1, this ring road that circumnavigates the island.

And so in the same way that this road map bridges these villages dispersed across the expanses of uninhabitable landscape.

The mapping of genomes also has all this uncharted territory between what are considered landmarks in the DNA sequence.

I figured that filming down from the ground would have provided a more familiar perspective. So by pulling away, I hoped that it would provide maybe a more objective viewpoint on these patterns that are united across levels of scale and that that would hopefully remind us that there's this inescapable interconnectedness between everything.

The microscope offered this top-down view of this tiny world invisible to us for so long and now that we crafted this window into the smallest cellular landscapes and views of the largest mountainous landscapes, we have this new way of piecing together spatial relationships between natural elements and how they ultimately affect the bigger picture.

...