Archipelago

Archipelago (2015), Interactive Installation

Silvia Ruzanka, Young Suk Lee, Ben Chang

Archipelago is an interactive installation about cities, cycles of growth and decay, consumer waste, and the pollution of the atmosphere. A landscape of detrius, life choked by plastic and smog – can something grow again from underneath?

For this monstrous table, I crafted textiles out of discarded plastic bags, embroidered with thread and electronic cabling, like the Great Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific, and incorporating material from the exhibition site in Shenzhen, China. A 3D printed interactive sculpture sits in the center, a fantastical grotesque abstraction of a sea creature tangled in these nets, simultaneously dangerous and vulnerable. A video projection of algorithmically generated urban microplanets hangs overhead in a dense orange haze, while video projection of dots of light course through the tendrils on the table, giving flickers of life to mechatronic fungi.