Trey Marshall

Renewal

Post-Climate, Narrative, Game

This thesis is an interactive experience about uncovering the original intent of a nuclear waste repository in a post-ice age landscape, beyond the limits of our current climate context. Inside blended ecologies, we are forced to reinterpret things once familiar to us, attach new meaning to past markers and tombs, explore plantlife revealed from their underground ecosystems, and manipulate the creations of a long lost past. Through visual storytelling and interactive traversal, this experience seeks to evoke an urgency for designing in different time-scales so that we might reinterpret approaches to current ecological issues from short to long-term.

Using nuclear energy and waste systems as a vessel, this thesis pushes into the long timescales present in the Sandia reports of 1993 and a 2010 documentary titled "Into Eternity", where a singular question persists: How do we make sure nuclear waste repositories are perceived as dangerous for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years in the future? Landscapes of concrete thorns, world maps of nuclear waste repositories, forbidding blocks, and message kiosks all part of a cohesive level-based system to relay messages across millennia to creatures who might not have the capacity to understand our technology or even read.

Scientists predict that over the next 100,000 years (not too far into the range) it is possible that the next ice age will begin, which alone will radically alter the earth's landscapes and render all types of warning messages unclear even to us today. Time-based media affords exploration inside of these long timescales, letting ideas of alternative futures simmer and bubble, ecological ghosts intertwining and loosening, slowly defining and re-interpreting spaces once familiar into sites of new rituals.

While I do not think that we should be attempting to masterplan the future, I do believe that we have a duty as those with an architectural mind to imagine how new systems might interact with each other in a future not far from our own. By designing time-based speculative realities, we allow ourselves to imagine what our own world could look like, and to understand our current environment through a different perspective.

DAC machine spins its fans for the first time since the ice age began

A dense fungal network blocks the path through an eroded tunnel

The player begins their journey

Game systems overlaid to show a dense network