Gyre – mdl design

From Scars to Salvation

Instructor: Jennifer Chen
Partners: Fred Ge and Emiliano Perez Garrado
Course: 3GA Earth Machine Studio_Walking Giants
Year: Fall 2024

The waste and excess of the twentieth century continued through the twenty-first century, leaving the world in decay. A symptom of this decay is seen through our garbage. The folly of the plasticine spilled ever more into our oceans. Currents and gyres pulled our garbage into massive floating continents of plastic. The decay of the world forever locked in by the currents, constantly breaking down, yet never decomposing, leaving eternal monuments to humanity’s arrogance.

The film imagines a time of planetary clean-up in the midst of a global energy transition where efforts to produce clean energy and efforts to clean up our oceans collide. We follow the installation of a wind turbine blade back up its’ supply chain, witnessing the upscaling of wind turbines into many networks of wind walls stretching across our globe. From the periphery of our garbage patches, we see the manufacturing process of energy and apparatus taking place side by side. The site of raw material extraction becomes the site of energy production.

Along the way, we realize the endeavors to heal one wound would lead to the means to remediate others. Singularity became multiplicity. Decades of waste became millions of blades, harnessing the wind energy to power the restoration of not just our oceans but the remediation of countless other scars of the Anthropocene.

One generation’s refuse became another’s salvation.