Encountering the Otherwise is the third and final installment of the Media and Materiality series. This triptych explores both established and alternative ways in which media can expand the concept of materiality: Rather than treating media as representational surfaces, the series posits media as operative environments—synthetic, spatial, and potentially occupy-able—where materiality is enacted rather than merely depicted.
The installation presents five Episodes of Encounter with the Underlands—occluded yet vital planetary forces in conversation with submerged networks of extraction and exploitation that sustain life on the surface. Each Episode is articulated through a dual system and a series of companion drawings:
- Data Object: The physical installation functioning as a material anchor.
- Data Environment: A computational layer—video sequences algorithmically mapped and projected in three dimensions onto the corresponding Data Object—producing a hybrid spatial ecology of physical and virtual matter.
