#speculativefutures

Overgrowing Technology (2023/24)

Technology and nature have always been perceived as opposing forces - one synthetic, calculated, and ever-advancing; the other organic, unpredictable, and cyclical. Overgrowing Technology explores this duality, creating a space where nostalgia, digital decay, and organic growth converge.

Using nine iMac G3s I reconstruct a personal and collective history of the internet, memory, and digital landscapes. Arranged in a structured 3x3 grid on a blue industrial shelf, these obsolete machines become both relics and vessels, their screens displaying a fragmented video poem in four acts. The work juxtaposes decayed technology with organic life: chrome planters overflowing with greenery, artificial grass, an aquarium, and luminous star stickers evoke childhood memories and digital dreams.

This piece is, in part, an archive of my personal relationship with the internet - a journey through wonder, obsession, disillusionment, and reconciliation. The videos within the iMacs oscillate between past and present, combining found footage, historical references, and original recordings made with handheld cameras, Coolpix, Super 8 film, and iPhones. The layered visuals are complemented by self-produced music and poetry, shaping a multisensory experience.

At the heart of the installation, a mirrored iMac shatters the grid’s uniformity, its reflective fragments inviting the viewer into a space of self-recognition and digital distortion. The work does not seek to romanticize nostalgia but rather to examine its function - how past technological landscapes linger in contemporary digital culture, how the obsolete is repurposed, and how memory itself is an evolving interface.

With Overgrowing Technology, I aim to cultivate a dialogue between the organic and the artificial, questioning whether technology can ever truly become obsolete, or if it simply transforms - overgrown by nature, absorbed into memory, and rewritten into new narratives.

Waterworld: Speculative Cities of the (rising sea-level) future

"For years, scientists have warned about the danger of rising sea levels — and thanks to Pittsburgh artist Nickolay Lamm, we can now see what the impact might look like in real life. Armed with stock photos of popular U.S. sites and projection maps from Climate Central, Lamm painstakingly re-created each scene as it would appear after a 25-foot rise in sea level. The good news is, it will take hundreds of years to get there (levels are only projected to rise 2 to 6 feet by the year 2100) but Lamm says he’s hoping to draw attention to the threat of climate change now, before the worst effects take hold."

Farmscapers: Speculative future (stacked) cities

"Architect Vincent Callebaut’s "Asian Cairn" project imagines a future where we house residences, offices, and even entire food systems in gorgeous, stacked skyscrapers."

Captions from top:

"This concept design imagines buildings of the future as "farmscrapers," self-contained cities in one giant tower."

"The "farmscrapers" are pebble-like pods stacked on top of each other."

"These incredible looking buildings are designed by a Belgian architect named Vincent Callebaut."

Speculative Sea Level Explorer

Benedikt Groß created an app (downloadable here) that speculatively calculates future coastal landscapes. Using data from the Scripps Institution Of Oceanography paired with bathymetry ("underwater evaluation"), Groß made short - 18-40 seconds each - animations of various cities around the world. LA's potential future shape is illustrated here.

"The Speculative Sea Level Explorer by interaction designer Benedikt Groß investigates how the coastline and the territory of the world will be reshaped by a rise of the sea level due to Global Warming.

While the simulation, captured as a series of animations, is roughly accurate, it actually shows the consequence of more "dramatic" changes in sea level than what is currently expected by climate change models."

>2 degrees of separation <2028: Akira and <2 degrees of separation <2028: Akira from the series when i was a buoyant, Josh Wodak, 2012

From the exhibition statement:

"These portraits are set in the midst of this period of near-history: the year 02028. They show different sea level heights in ‘best case’ (less than 2 degrees temperature increase) and ‘worst case’ (more than 2 degrees temperature increase) scenarios over the century leading up to 02028. Their base rate is February 02010, which is one nutation of the earth before asteroid XF11 will pass by. It is within this single nutation that climate scientists are calling The Critical Decade: the period in which the tipping point for limiting increases to less than 2 degrees will or will not be breached. The base rate is taken as the base of one’s neck as this is the universal height the sea comes up to on a buoyant body. It is us, any of us, treading water two summers ago in the sea. It is a situation of being in it up to our necks, with a narrowing margin remaining for the rate of rise to not outstrip the buoyancy of the body, like an ocean wave washing overhead while ones body remains stationary.