| Time | 5 Months (2024/2025) |
|---|---|
| Team Members | Andrea Borsato, Sarah Cosentino, Zixin Mou, Zhuoyue Song, Giulia JiangXian Zhu |
| Role | Design Research / Visual Design / Interaction Design |
| Course | Politecnico di Milano - Final Design Studio 2 (More-than-Human AI) | Supervisors | Elisa Giaccardi, Francesco Vergani, Salvatore Andolina, |
Ripples: Voices of the Lagoon is an interactive installation that explores ecological justice through a more-than-human lens. Set in a speculative future of the Venetian Lagoon, the installation invites visitors to participate in a shared governance scenario with non-human entities such as salt marshes, mollusks, and even the MOSE infrastructure. By translating weight shifts into audiovisual disturbances, Ripples offers a multisensory experience of imbalance and environmental negotiation.
The MOSE system was designed to shield Venice from rising sea levels, yet it has brought unintended ecological harm. By closing the lagoon off from tidal flows, MOSE accelerates the erosion of salt marshes and alters the delicate ecosystem it was meant to protect. Ripples challenges this preservation model and asks: what does it mean to preserve a place if we silence its living systems?
The installation fabulates a future where governance is shared between human and more-than-human actors. Visitors are invited to redistribute symbolic resources—pebbles—across totems representing different lagoonal entities. These gestures enact political choices, influencing which entities are amplified or silenced. Through this, Ripples renders visible the asymmetries of multispecies justice and asks participants to listen beyond the human.
Visitors interact with the installation by placing pebbles onto a circular platform supported by load sensors. As weights shift, TouchDesigner software translates the imbalance into glitching audio-visual feedback: distorted speech, flickering lights, disrupted soundscapes. Each totem embodies a multispecies presence, and the system responds by amplifying or suppressing their “voices” accordingly.
