Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: SUNK COSTS is an interactive sound and object installation that examines the Felicity Ace cargo shipwreck as a site where global supply chains, financial speculation, and ecological entanglements intersect. Using spatialized audio, sculptural fragments, and interactive engagement, the project navigates the complexities of economic abstraction, material afterlives, and speculative storytelling. Visitors encounter layered narratives—told through insurance documents, burned lithium batteries, submerged luxury goods, and emergent deep-sea ecologies—revealing the collision of capitalist excess and detrimental environmental transformation. The installation immerses audiences in an oceanic evidence room, where objects and voices trace the wreck's logistical, financial, and biological aftershocks. This nonlinear experience encourages visitors to explore the wreck not as a clear-cut disaster but as a site of systemic opacity. SUNK COSTS challenges perceptions of catastrophe, reframing it as both an overwhelming crisis and an opportunity to reimagine value, lifestyles and planetary futures. What new methods of perception and accountability are needed in an era in which disasters become slow, ubiquitous and illegible?
Authors: Jamie Allen, Matthew J Lutz, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Chris Woebken, Louise Carver
Institutions: Avans University of Applied Sciences, Columbia University
Language: English
Topic: Sound Studies and Aurality
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4412045109