Benjamin Han

The thesis uses speculative fiction to tell truths of the present. We are caught in irreversible histories of disturbances to and with our environment. We have actively sought to suppress coexistence, enabling unexpected natural mechanisms of destruction to proliferate. We have enlisted machines to disentangle ourselves and other organisms into alienated resources, thus manufacturing the destruction of the environment that we are fundamentally codependent on. There may be no return to previous states of coexistence, but the moment calls for us to believe and participate in the creation of a new set of disturbances, ones for a future of collaborative resurgence.

Website

Mycelium collage

Digital Drawing

1592px x 1195px

Mycelium is the hidden network which mushrooms emerge from. Mycelia is not one single entity, but refers to a collection of strands making up the building blocks of what we see and identify as fungi. Fungi, over years, break down the most impermeable of structures, offering life-giving chemicals to other agents of life.

Machine of dismantling

Video

1920px x 1080px

A machine that builds and unbuilds itself.

Machine of Dismantling

Digital Drawing

2462px x 1847px

A machine of dismantling advances through a suburban neighbourhood of the abandoned city, rebuilding and reconfiguring itself with every step it takes reclaiming studs siding, walls of abandoned housing into stock material for the residents left behind.

Machine of Re-Excavation

Digital Drawing

3096px x 2064px

The machine of re-excavation travels down the highway, unearthing and severing the Transmountain crude oil pipeline as it builds and unbuilds itself down the highway. Seasonal floods have rendered the Kinder Morgan coastal terminal all but unserviceable. Despite the shutting down of services, leakages still threaten the resident’s activities.

Machine of Re-Excavation

Digital Drawing

3096px x 2064px

Construction drawing for the machine of re-excavation.

Machine of the Flour Miller

Digital Drawing

4168px x 2778px

The residents no longer know the taste of refined flour. The machine of the flour miller wastes no part of the grain and only produces whole grain flour, greatly simplifying its assembly, operation, structure and seasonal disassembly.

Machine of the Metallurgist

Digital Drawing

4168px x 2778px

A pile of salvaged metal sits in the upper floor of the Machine of the Metallurgist. Steel, forged in Western China, further alienated on a journey of long distance shipping, find its way into a bin at the Machine of the Metallurgist. The specialist begin a long process of reconciliation by recirculating this metal indefinitely.

Machine of the Botanist

Digital Drawing

4168px x 2778px

The machine of the Botanist visits the barren monoculture farming landscape, where pathogens and disease have proliferated and wiped out common farming crops. It searches for signs of unexpected life. Its goal: support the seeds of the next generation of interspecies life.

Machines of Co-inhabitation

Digital Drawing

8334px x 6250px

The world we live in continues to be a patchy landscape with unstable boundaries between what is constructed by us and what constructs us. The machines of the new age deny the dominant discourse that Man had seized control of earth and fundamentally fixed its trajectory in place; We did not get here alone, and certainly, we cannot reconcile with the messes we made alone.

Architecture ↓