Arctic Trash Dreams
Digital Animation, 2025, 00:33 minuteshttps://vimeo.com/1101673146
The character is made from plastic trash collected around Svalbard in the Arctic, assembled into a puppet, then 3D scanned and animated.
A goal of this anthropomorphizing is to imagine the more-than-human with which we share the world talking back to us. What is the agency inside of the plastic we scattered around the globe? Can we feel empathy for it?
In our globally connected era, it is difficult to define where one place ends and another begins, especially because of all that we bring with us, material and societal. This raises questions of how people can travel to these areas and at what costs? What do we bring with us? And what do we leave behind? From the necessary construction materials to food to marine debris, it is all from somewhere else. And it has to be taken away.
The digital trash-puppets in my animations will tell, in absurd tragic-comedic fashion, how these different things have come to the Arctic, what they do there, and what might happen next.
Related, I embrace the glitches and catches in the technology (photogrammetry, 3D animation, etc) in that they reveal the processes talking about themselves.