One is Not Enough

An interactive installation built around a single reversal. A circular monitor set into a metal-grey structure works as the porthole of a submarine: through it you watch a clear sea with one small fish in it, drawn in the pixel art of an arcade game. A proximity sensor notices you at forty centimetres, and the water it showed you turns out to be a picture. It clouds over, waste builds into a barrier that blocks the fish, and the screen names the cause.

You are then invited to pull a lever. On screen a robotic arm hauls out a bag of rubbish; inside the cabinet a servomotor drops a physical cube onto a fishing net. Each cube carries engraved fragments about an everyday object on five faces and an NFC tag on the sixth, and has to be read and sorted into one of three hatches — paper, plastic, general waste. Sort it right and the light turns green and the fish keeps swimming. Sort it wrong and the light turns red and the fish dies. After a number of cubes decided at random when the session starts, the fish dies anyway, and a closing message explains that the lever only gave the impression of control.

The piece runs on an Arduino Mega wired to the proximity sensor, the lever's limit switch, four servomotors, three NFC readers and three LED strips, with Max 8 driving the visuals and sound over a serial link. The cubes, the fish and the hatches were modelled in Fusion 360 and 3D printed; the cabinet stacks three IKEA LACK tables to 135 cm, clad in plywood, with an internal funnel of five panels and a foam ramp that returns every cube to circulation so the installation can run without being reloaded.

Built with Ethimad Abdel and Vittorio Lama for Sistemi Interattivi I, on the theme of marine transparency.