Back to Primeval Seas: Semester 1, Master Digital Design Amsterdam

In my second week at the Master Digital Design program, we had an intense week of creating a face filter. We were given a clipping of a futuristic newspaper that had several articles in it. I chose the short text about life under water possible in the future. Our task was to create a vision that would link to the storyline and ultimately be the inspiration for our first analog mask and the resulting filter. You can read the story below.

THIS PAGE IS STILL IN THE MAKING

From 2045 on, it is possible for people to breathe and eventually live under water due to cheap operations and a drug which makes people’s skin waterproof, invented by cuban scientists.

5 years after the drug’s release, mass panic occurs because global warming is becoming extremely threatening; earth is overpopulated and also in increasingly poor condition. 90% of the world population make the decision to go underwater for good. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the govern- ment wanted: they forced scientists before to explore solutions and made the drug cheap enough to make as many people as possible live under water and die, since the beneficial drug was not yet fully developed and shows fierce side effects.

The remaining 10% are people who refused to take the drug in the first place and now suffer from the fact that there is very little nutrition and resources left on earth. Therefore they have to fight more and more for survival and even become cannibals.

The analogue mask shows how people’s skin condition changes when they take the drug permanently. It becomes more dynamic and shows some deformations: gel-like deformations appear in certain parts of the face.