Journey through imagined worlds & speculative futures with Prefab Paradise, a new exhibition by Amy J Wilson and Meitao Qu at Turf Projects. Blending miniature dioramas and immersive technology, visitors are invited to contemplate entangled utopian visions of natural and built environments. A central human habitat is surrounded by four natural biomes: rainforest, grassland, ocean and desert, with visitors invited to take a first person view of the constructed worlds through digital first person view goggles and projection.

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The project draws from real and fictional spaces portraying an idealised image of nature that haunts our collective consciousness, including the Cold War era experiment of BIOS-3, contemporary proposals for megastructures, the underwater city of Rapture from videogame Bioshock, and popular references such as the Windows XP desktop background. Prefab Paradise invites us to consider the idea of “utopia” less as a single idea, and more as something unstable and contested; shaped by politics, technology, marketing and collective imagination.

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The project has been developed alongside a series of workshops with Art Press and Croydon School of Art students, exploring speculative modelmaking, worldbuilding and social dreaming. Participants were invited to build their own biosphere using a combination of physical modelmaking, digital worldbuilding and 3D printing processes. Their worlds are on display as part of the collaborative installation.

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Research and development for Prefab Paradise was supported by Collusion through their ART//TECH//PLAY programme.

 

Link to Press Release

Installation photography by Mitsi Moulson