Context

We really wanted to examine how to engage the senses in our exhibit, for which we used two main memorial precedents: the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. and the shoe exhibit in the D.C. Holocaust museum. The Vietnam War Memorial engaged the senses primarily using tangibility; visitors often touch the engravings to feel the literal cut into stone. The shoe exhibit at the Holocaust Museum uses smell, as part of the overwhelming experience in seeing the thousands of shoes is the tanned leather smell that accompanies them which makes the experience much more real and present for the visitor. These interactions are what encouraged us to create an immersive experience where visitors are literally forced to have a very physical experience of swimming through water. 

In terms of portending calamities, we used the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as our main sign of the future. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a source of some of the most evocative images relating to the anthropocene and the marks that humankind has irrevocably left on the environment. As we are all well aware, the ocean often has trash dumped in it on a range from individual littering to deliberate corporate dumping. However, all of these pieces of trash get moved along via ocean currents until the ocean currents come together to create the trash vortexes that we see.The Garbage Patch is a herald of change for the ecosystems and environments we will live in; we will probably have many hundreds of species to mourn, if not tremendous human loss with the reduction of food supply.