Installation
D-Fuse in collaboration with Scanner
EyeBeam New York USA
The world is an ever changing, unconquerable place & yet our consumption of global products leads us to believe that the world & the things we use are everlasting. At the same time the world is becoming smaller & more homogenous at precisely the time that record numbers of people have the ability to travel to far-flung corners of it.
With the same meal in every stomach, the same song on every radio, the same story on every news page, the same coffee in every cup, we are moving towards a monochrome culture, led by multinational business, where every high street has been replaced by global & national chains. With economic systems that favour the large, remote & uniform there’s a threat to local economies & communities, diversity & choice. Aligned with this, biologists have suggested we are now living through a global mass extinction with environmental degradation & over-consumption, driving countless plant & animal species to extinction.
D-Fuse created a multi-screened immersive environment that used 3D animations of high resolution still photos & simple vector maps of the planet to explore these issues. Offering a reading of this global mono-culture where aesthetic, architectural, agricultural, natural & civic diversity is being lost as the consumer driven culture spreads across the globe.
As a data driven installation that explores themes of consumption, the first module referenced McDonalds & was chosen for Small Global as the most widely acknowledged symbol of the growth of mass global
consumption. By graphically mapping the data of the company’s growth against the destruction of the rainforests the audience experienced the hidden costs of the great changes in our world.
The second module contrasted the mining & prices of Coltan [the metal used in cellular phone chips] in the Congo, against the human death toll & the extermination of the world’s gorilla population. These are all facts that wash by us in our daily consumption of convenience & technology.
