The video installation that makes us swim in our own mess

Is this how marine animals see our achievements?

Lawrence M. Pierce

By Sandrine Ceurstemont

Entangled, The Animal Museum, Los Angeles, until 19 February

COLOURFUL plastic bags swirl ethereally underwater. The sound of waves intermingles with human-made sounds such as shipping noise, commonplace in oceans. It’s like being inside a gyre. Could this be a sea animal’s view of human waste and noise? That’s the question posed by artist Ethan Turpin, who has created an immersive video installation, Deep Blue Plastic, now on display at the Entangled exhibition in the dry confines of The Animal Museum, Los Angeles.

By creating a 360-degree projection, Turpin aims to make us face up to the growing problem of plastic pollution. With an estimated 240,000 tonnes of debris in the oceans, animals can mistake the waste for plants and eat it, often dying from starvation as their stomachs fill with indigestible plastic. Tiny pieces also pass up the food chain, as fish are eaten by larger animals or humans.

Turpin says the piece is “intended to be beautiful as well as claustrophobic and alarming at the same time”. Using immersive art to tackle environmental issues is a common thread in Turpin’s work, because he aims to create a visceral connection to the content rather than merely providing stark statistics. “It’s not an abstract phenomenon when you’re confronted with it all around you,” he says. “It becomes more of a part of your life.”

It may be working. The piece seemed to provoke those who saw it into either thoughtful silence or comments that the government should take urgent action.

In an earlier installation, Turpin surrounded viewers with wildfire footage, allowing them to feel how quickly flames spread and objects can be consumed. The piece was presented in Santa Barbara, where residents live with the threat of such fires. Despite that, and residents receiving official advice on how to cope with the threat, the art seemed to have a galvanising effect. “People were commenting that they had better clear the landscape around their house,” says Turpin.

Along with the visceral, Turpin is also struggling with the complexities of the negotiated boundaries between nature and civilisation. The effect we have on climate is especially complicated, prompting him to wonder whether climate change could be visualised. “There is constant debate and denial about causality and result,” says Turpin. “It’s an interesting challenge for artists to step into that space and try to represent it in a meaningful way.”

“Animals mistake waste for plants and eat it, dying from starvation as their stomachs fill with plastic”

Together with Naomi Tague and her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Turpin is now working on an interactive digital landscape map for a show in 2018. It will combine a range of environmental information, such as wildfire forecasts and climate data. Visitors will be able to probe it using an on-screen slider, for example, checking how fire and water would behave if the climate warms by 2 °C compared with just 1 °C in 15 years.

Turpin is also building on his wildfire work by exploring a different tool: virtual reality. While the Rey fire blazed in Santa Barbara last year, he accompanied firefighters to capture footage, using a fireproof camera housing to get close up. Later, he brought a 360-degree camera to the site once a month to document the aftermath. The images will be combined into a two-year time-lapse piece that visitors can take in using VR goggles.

Turpin wants to create an augmented reality app for use on location. A view of the fire and its legacy would be superimposed on the landscape along with live animations that could show, for example, how much water a tree takes up on that day.

He is keen to find out how headsets will affect the way people interact with his work. As he says: “It creates more of a personal context but it’s also isolating. You won’t be able to turn to a friend beside you who is having the same experience.”

Even so, the power of work like Turpin’s lies in this ultra-personal, grass-roots effect – which may be humanity’s best chance of forcing genuine political action.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Swimming in our mess”