Beyond Future Water. 4K film with stereo sound. Duration 15 mins. Commissioned by Hull City Council for Hull Maritime Museum
Beyond Future Water is a poetic search for traces of Hull’s whaling past, guided by the earbone of a North Atlantic bowhead whale – an artefact from the Hull Maritime Museum’s Handling Collection.
Once part of a living mammal that swam through quieter oceans during the era of Hull’s whaling industry, the earbone now seeks out sites in and around the city that resonate with its history, acting as a conduit between past, present, and imagined futures.
The journey begins as the earbone encounters its plastic doppelgänger on a North Sea shore, washed up like an echo, trying to assimilate the environments and stories around it. The two become absorbed in each other and travel through locations and digital memories that are haunted by a vivid maritime history.
They pass places such as Whalebone Corner, the Whalebone Inn, the River Hull, and Guildhall Timeball towards an almost empty Maritime Museum, where the earbone ultimately resides. The doppelgänger continues on its own journey, guided by digital instincts and flights of imagination.
Bringing together film, 3D LiDAR scans of artefacts and buildings, and a 3D-printed earbone, Beyond Future Water blurs the boundaries between original and replica, history and simulation. It explores how objects carry meaning, how truth is shaped, and what the fossils of an AI future might one day become.
