a space for encapsulation
Andrey Chugunov
‘a space for encapsulation’ is a new media art project exploring Scotland’s coastal zones—liminal sites among the first to erode under rising sea levels, where natural and industrial processes entangle. These coastlines form unstable assemblages: industrial ruins, defence structures, drifting plastic, and organic matter continuously merge, blurring lines between preservation and decay.
Developed over two years through expeditions across Scottish coastal towns, the project documented transient sites using photogrammetry and field recordings. Photogrammetry captures instability rather than fixed moments—3D scans reveal fractures, gaps, and distortions, mirroring shoreline erosion. Rather than forming a static archive, the scans embody ever-eroding memory, artefacts suspended digitally in perpetual fragmentation. Visually, the project consists of 41 one-minute video loops, each centred around digital artefacts. Suspended objects slowly break apart or proliferate through particle systems, visualising both material decay and organic growth.
Glitches, missing textures, and digital fractures emphasise the landscape’s resistance to digitisation, highlighting matter's instability. Artefacts are paired with fragmented monologues as subtitles—meditations on time, materiality, and humanity’s uncertain future from a geological perspective. Complementing these animations is a generative soundscape created from expedition field recordings, forming an evolving sonic layer echoing the shore’s turbulence. ‘a space for encapsulation’ challenges binary narratives of nature and culture, preservation and disappearance. The project transforms the coastline into a site of entanglement, where traces of industrial extraction and terraforming are gradually reclaimed by organic processes, forming shifting assemblages of matter and memory neither ruins nor pristine, but landscapes continuously evolving through layers of abandonment and renewal.
Project Collaborators:
The project was co-commissioned by Aberdeen Performing Arts and New Media Scotland's Alt-w Fund with investment from Creative Scotland.
