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 time traveller between past, present, and imagined futures.
The journey begins as the earbone encounters its plastic doppelgänger on the shores of the North Sea, 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 visit places such as Whalebone Corner, the Whalebone Inn, the River Hull, and the Guildhall Timeball, then onwards to 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.
Background to Trove: Beyond Future Water
In 2019 we were commissioned by Hull City Council to develop new work for Hull Maritime, a £70m heritage-led project funded by Hull City Council and The National Lottery Heritage Fund. This project involved the transformation of six historic sites and the restoration of two iconic ships – the Spurn Lightship and The Arctic Corsair, to create one of the leading maritime experiences outside London.
Working as part of the wider team with lead consultants Purcell Architects, Southern Green Landscape Architects, exhibition designers Haley Sharpe Design and art consultant Hazel Colquhoun, we have been developing a body of work inspired by the maritime collection that gives a voice to the city’s maritime past, present and future.
Part of our process was to work with surveyors to undertake high-resolution scans of some of the artefacts held at the Hull Maritime Museum before they went into long-term storage in 2020. The data from these scans were used to create Trove – a body of work which includes a series of six sculptural stone waymarkers and five interpretation panels for the route adjacent to Queen’s Garden, connecting the Hull Maritime Museum with the North End Shipyard. The data was also used to create three new films (Ship of Light, Beyond Future Water and Ship of Ice) which will be displayed inside the two museum ships and the newly developed Maritime Museum.
