Fluvial Effluvia:
Big Muddy and Little Buddy
Digital Animation, 2026, 04:49 minutes
(excerpts)
A puppet, made of trash collected from the shores of the Mississippi River in Memphis, encounters a mystical garbage bag. The puppet free falls through a spectrum of waste, digitally glitching as it goes. The puppet comes to in an improperly constructed version of the river’s wooded shore, encounters an anthropomorphized computer also made of trash, and realizes that it has always already been a simulation or at best heavily surveilled. The puppet embraces the condition and the computer, deliriously spins, while the computer spews waste around the scene.
The animation features semi-autonomous digital puppets made from 3D scans of trash. The scenery is of 3D scans of places around Memphis, revealing the glitches and seams that happen when consumer technology is mis-used. It is about, in part, the fragility of the river, surveillance, capitalism, consumerism, data centers, and of course, waste.
The goal is to inspire ways of thinking of life with which we share the world as a fragile assemblage of parts (plants, animals, trash, machines, etc.). Recognizing these assemblages, through the literalness of the puppets being built from trash, can inspire us to act with more respect for the other things with which we share the world. By assembling these “things” into digital puppets and anthropomorphizing them, they take on a sense of uncanny life, like that of physical puppets.
Project support for Fluvial Effluvia provided by Tri-Star Arts/ Current Art Fund.