The general ‘falsified’ consensus of the future prompted my interpretation of a dystopia and how the latter is more likely to emerge when thinking of the future than a utopia. A dystopian world may not seem so unlikely when we consider the following predictions: “most of the fish stocks that exist now will be extinct”, “6.3 billion people will live in cities”, “global number of internets connected devices will reach 237,500,000,000”, “5 billion of the worlds projected 9.7 billion people will live in water stressed areas.”(Hacker Noon, 2019) A few amongst many, these statistics are expected to be our truth by 2050. But can we really predict the future? Anything could change in the years to come.

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Personally, a ‘utopia’ seems unlikely solely based on the very subjective nature of the word to each individual; one’s ‘utopia’ has the potential to be another’s ‘dystopia’. If we consider the definition of a ‘utopia’ as: “an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect”, how do we quantify perfection? One person may believe their life embodies ‘perfection’ in the respect that its positivity is optimal, yet others may feel the polar opposite. To this end, discussing the possibility of a ‘perfect society’ is pointless.

The ‘unknown’ remains relentlessly interesting to me. We are materialistic and to an extent greedy, although, beyond material surplus it is hardly possible for all humans to fulfill their desires. Personally, the hypothetical existence of a ‘utopia’ connotes the outbreak of chaos, not too dissimilar from what would be expected of a ‘dystopia.’ Imbalance would prevail: cultural beliefs, religion, land, human behavior as few examples of the many dichotomies within our society. Imbalances already largely exist within society considering the wage gap and the poverty extremes; “the gap between rich and poor may be reaching its peak”. Moreover, the gap between the wealthy and the poor “is at its highest level in decades”. (TreeHugger, 2019)

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Beyond wealth, from my exposure to animal life in my studies, I have come to the realisation of the critical condition of marine wildlife. Overfishing is at its paramount, endangering fish, while sharks are being killed for their fins. Beyond the wildlife, the ocean’s acidity levels are incessantly rising; we have reached levels comparable to the acidity of the ocean 35 million years ago due to the pollution in the water. An estimate was made from the journal marine policy, about an estimated ‘100 million sharks are killed every year by humans’. If we consider that ‘the ocean covers 71 percent of the earth’s surface’ it is disconcerting that people treat it like an infinite source and a litter bin.

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​Ultimately, I have used our population as the core of my work. Looking at the impacts of our actions with a pessimistic view, has shown me that the earth has been broken. Rather than returning to the way it was before man-kind, we must ‘revive’ it and live with the consequences we have caused. We must create a new lifestyle where we live with the environment instead of existing to live around it. Although I have a negative view on the future, I am excited to show more ways in which we can help the world rather than how we have destroyed it so far. Using plants, metals and plastics to show the divide between the natural and artificial I will experiment with the idea of having two worlds within one, where animals, living organism and humans can live together without any disruption. Not so much about how to achieve a utopia but more about what the first steps towards a utopia would be in my eyes.