Is progress measured by creation, or by the chaos we leave behind? Collishaw’s projection immerses us in a dystopian seascape, where heavy metals, microplastics and industrial waste alter marine life at the genetic level. These pollutants trigger unnatural mutations, producing strange, hypnotic creatures reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s visions. The ocean has become a Petri dish, where contamination meets technological interference. Synthetic biology offers hope, pollutant-eating bacteria and carbon-sequestering plants, yet it carries the risk of ecological imbalance. Artificial intelligence appears in a double role here: it promises sustainability, while deepening the crisis via the consumption of vast amounts of resources. At a certain point of the video, the camera reveals rows of coral-encrusted servers rising from the murky depths, monuments to human ingenuity and hubris. Accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s musical composition Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, the imagery evokes finality and fragility. Generated by AI, the footage offers an unsentimental glimpse of an ecosystem no longer shaped solely by natural selection but by human excess, setting the stage for a possible new, non-human intelligence born from the wreckage we left behind.

(Dalma Kovács)