The Ship of Fools

The Ship of Fools was an interactive papier-mâché boat made in homage to Plato’s Ship of Fools allegory.

This ship represents a complex, interwoven metaphor for human machine entanglement,. It symbolises many ships in mythology and life from Noah's ark, to the doomed Flying Dutchman, to a New Zealand colonial voyage and a modern barge carrying tons of garbage to an undisclosed location.

It is a depiction of humanity’s struggle for dominance over the natural world and shows our current precarious position as it relates to the natural world and the effects of “progress”.

I used a sensor and a series of microphones and motors that were activated when the viewer walked past. The flapping heads would record off one another creating an ever changing composition of sound and movement. Not only did this make the installation very entertaining for the audience but it also created a visual metaphor for inertia. These figures were trapped in a cycle, their mouths helplessly flapping, unable to stop the feedback loop.