This may look familiar to longtime readers, but the shimmering ocean of 60,000 compact discs was recreated by Paris-based artist Elise Morin for Kosice, Slovakia during White Night 2014. This beautiful landscape was created by hand-sewing the CDs together and laying them over inflatable mounds. The space can either be viewed as a rippling sea to a desert of plastic under different lighting conditions.
Morin says: “My first thought when I pondered a representation possible of the contemporary landscape turned into a desert of plastic, a symbol of the vision of western society in the second part of the 20th century. In that way, the CD is a very symbolic creation of this vision of the economy and of this period. The planned obsolescence, short-term technology, entertainment and use of polycarbonate married for better or for worse. The other issue is to represent an invisible landscape: the buried landscapes that are hidden or are aesthetic today: monumental waste disposal for example.”
