This presentation aims to demonstrate an online platform for sustainable education based on the ecology of images for an Arts Education, Technology, and Society class (AETS). The platform was intended to be a research tool, but today it incorporates didactic dimensions about ecological image production processes. It has therefore become an archive with different functions. For this communication we will focus on the narrative dimension of the platform, which crosses the didactic and research components, with great potential for Research Based Learning (RBL).

In this archive, we have data that includes textual, geographical, temporal, and audiovisual information on the history of image ecology. The archive is designed from the perspective of digital humanities, in which the data is treated as a narrative and aligned on certain issues. We have four exploratory axes to develop these issues: Historical, Laboratory, Artistic, and Educational. The axes function as categories we can cross to extend the narrative plan. For example, the Laboratory axis contains information such as molecules that act in photographic development, the Educational axis has teaching material such as exercises for sustainable image production, and the Historical axis includes information, for example, on the environmental consequences of the photographic industry, from the extraction of silver in analog photography to the resources used in digital imaging.

To demonstrate the narrative dimension, we will present the story of Dianne Iverglynne that discovered the spearmint-based photographic development formula in 1997. Dianne was studying Fine Art Photographic Illustration at Rochester Institute of Technology. She enrolled in the Technical Photography Chemistry course taught by Scott Williams, who discovered the coffee-based developing formula, Caffenol. The final assessment for this course was either a chemistry exam or the discovery of a new formula. Dianne was not a chemistry student and knew that she would have little chance of succeeding in the exam. However, Dianne was an artist, and her passion for photography and its processes set her off searching for a molecule that would enable a new formula. Compared to her colleagues, she had no chemistry literacy. She borrowed a book, and with her training and ability to recognize visual patterns, she discovered the similarities between thymol and hydroquinone benzine, which led her to the final solution.

Today, we can think and experiment with images more sustainably using this and other methods. However, the processes must be researched, organized, stabilized, and systematized. Above all, there is much to research and discover in this context.

One of the didatical challenges we propose is using today's technologies with Dianne's research methods and explore the idea of using archival images of molecules and pattern recognition in search of new development formulas. We can even use technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) so that the software itself can learn to recognize patterns. Our communication ends by questioning these different approaches such as the conscious relationship established with the environment through biochemistry and the unsustainable energy consumption of AI.

Keywords: Arts Education, Ecological Photography, Research Based Learning, Digital Humanities.