On the shifting edges of Scotland’s coastlines, where ruins dissolve and landscapes rewrite themselves, ‘a space for encapsulation’ traces the unstable meeting of industry and erosion. These landscapes, shaped over millennia, are now among the first to bear the impact of rising sea levels. They are neither purely natural nor entirely anthropogenic but exist as assemblages—hybrid environments where industrial ruins, military fortifications, drifting plastic, fishing threads and organic matter like algae, shells, armours and claws, mosses and lichens coalesce into new, unstable formations. These shifting terrains resist categorization, dissolving the boundaries between preservation and decay, human intervention and geological time.

Developed over two years through expeditions across Scottish coastal towns, the project documented transient sites using photogrammetry and field recordings. These expeditions consisted of trips to Ardrossan, Saltcoats, Stevenston, Irvine, Footdee and Blackdog beaches in Aberdeen, Fraserburgh, Peterhead, Old Slains Castle, Foveran pillboxes, St. Andrews, East Wemyss Caves, Lundin Links, Edinburgh, and Siccar Point.

The project utilises photogrammetry to encapsulate these anthropogenic/natural assemblages in coastal zones as a ruined museum of industrialisation and extractivist terraforming under new layers of organicism and smooth destruction by natural actors. Photogrammetry is used not as a tool of objective documentation but as a means of revealing instability. The resulting 3D scans do not fix these coastal artefacts in time but expose their resistance to digitization—fractures, gaps, and distortions mirroring the gradual erosion of the shoreline. In this way, ‘a space for encapsulation’ does not function as an archive in the traditional sense but as a dynamic, ever-eroding memory, where each artefact is both preserved and fragmented.

The project consists of 41 one-minute video loops, each centred around digital artefacts hovering in void-like spaces. Suspended objects slowly break apart or proliferate through particle systems, visualising both material decay and organic growth. Glitches, missing textures, and digital fractures emphasise the landscape’s resistance to digitisation, highlighting the matter's instability. Each artefact is paired with fragmented monologues as subtitles—meditations on time, materiality, and humanity’s uncertain future from a geological perspective.

‘dystopian soundscapes’ is the sonic layer of ‘a space for encapsulation’ project.
You can listen to it by the link.

Field recordings were gathered to document the acoustic atmosphere of the liminal sites. These recordings serve as the foundation of the composition, preserving sounds of seals screeching, harbour operations, bird cries, the voices of people in tourist coastal areas, virtually silent recordings in dunes, the sounds of coastal waves, the creaks of abandoned industrial buildings, the sound of wind passing through ruins and so on.
The soundscape unfolds across multiple layers, shaped through equalisation and spatial effects such as reverb and delay. A low-frequency layer accentuates deep surface tremors and distant industrial echoes, while a high- and mid-frequency layer forms a dynamic sonic fabric, interweaving natural and anthropogenic sounds. These elements continuously shift and evolve, mirroring the fluidity of the coastal environment.

To emphasise the conflict between natural and synthetic/industrial additional generative elements are introduced. Machine-learning-generated samples, designed to mimic the gathered field recordings, create an uncanny echo of the original soundscape—an artificial memory that mirrors and distorts reality, much like the project’s photogrammetric scans of coastal artefacts. Another layer consists of fragmented digital glitches, reminiscent of buffering errors, reinforcing the notion of impermanence and loss. These glitches echo the visual part of the project, where artefacts showing the intertwining of the natural and the industrial are distorted during the scanning of these 3D objects, highlighting the depth of distortion of the viewer's perception in the process of contemplation.

This generative composition does not follow a fixed structure but unfolds in real-time, embodying the turbulence and transience of the shore. As the landscape itself is in flux, so too is its sonic representation—a continuously shifting record of a disappearing world.

The narrative of ‘a space for encapsulation’ unfolds across four interwoven narrative sequences, tracing the entanglement of organic and industrial processes along Scotland’s shifting coastlines.

The first sequence, “It all started on the shore,” explores the origins of organic life, following the journey of elemental compounds from volatile volcanic zones into the ocean and back onto land. These flows of matter—carried by waves, absorbed by living organisms, and deposited over time—suggest an unbroken cycle of formation, dissolution, and renewal.

In “Architecture as a Shell,” human infrastructure is examined as a protective shell, temporarily enclosing life before being shed and reclaimed. The sequence draws parallels between architecture, water, and the cyclical rhythms of abandonment and return—how cities shape coastlines, how water is harnessed and discarded, and how the remnants of human habitation are inevitably pulled back into natural processes.

The third sequence, “Transient Traces,” focuses on the absorption of human artefacts into the coastal environment, where industrial debris, eroded structures, and discarded materials merge with organic forms. The distinction between the built and the natural dissolves, as tides, sand, and plant life smooth, erode, and integrate these remnants into new, unstable configurations.

Finally, “The Shore is a Space of Solitude” contemplates the carbon cycle and the impermanence of all structures, living and non-living. Beached animals, skeletal remains, and decaying artefacts echo the long geological timescales that render human traces granular and fleeting. In the vast temporal scale of the planet, all forms—biological and artificial—are destined to be reabsorbed, leaving only fragmented impressions before vanishing into the sediment of deep time.