YOUNGBLOOD Award nominee

Hic Sunt Dracones

Hic Sunt Dracones investigates the value of the monster figure throughout history, as a means to better interpret questions that are difficult to understand and overcome. The project explores the meaning, impact, and visual language of potential 21st. century monsters and how they can help us to understand and critique Anthropocene crises such as climate change, mass population and global extinctions.

It is a speculative, first-person experience which explores an archaeological site, set in a distant future, containing time capsules with the monsters and their remnants that have taken shape in, and reflect upon the 21st century. Within the 21st century, the time capsules functioned as a way to warn and instruct, reminding the people to think about the very things they were all fighting against.

These time capsules showcased the ability to be buried, as a last resort when extinctions had been set in irreversible motion. For the generations after us, these capsules would not only function as instruction and warning but also possess the need to teach. To educate the successor of mankind on the immense questions and problems we were dealing with. May they be more aware, and not make the same mistakes.

It has been many centuries, you find yourself at the beginning of a, yet undiscovered, burial site. Containing artefacts of a lost world. You submerge yourself on the history that exists within, and on these walls.