The Evacuated
Immersive installation based on the modelling and simulation of a forest ecosystem — a collaboration with Femke Herregraven and BJ Nilsen
The Evacuated is a simulation of a forest ecosystem that continuously rewrites its own rules. Unable to retain fixed narratives or stable memory, the system remains in permanent flux. Driven by a computational model and rendered in a game engine, the forest mutates in real time, generating unpredictable cycles of emergence and erosion in which time fractures and resists linear progression. In an age of modelled futures, the work confronts the desire to secure the unknowable by staging a system that resists prediction and cannot stabilise either its past or its future.
Presented as an immersive installation, The Evacuated prototypes a forest that is both a place of risk and a place at risk. The landscape is inspired by a Dutch forest hosting a living field genebank and responds to the paradox of conservation as an attempt to fix life in time. Turning this logic inside out, The Evacuated models a forest driven by instability. The title refers to a condition of being evacuated: living beings forced out of their familiar space, and time. In this state of suspension – neither fully departing nor arriving – linear time breaks down. In this catastrophic temporality, catastrophe is not an event but a protocol: an ongoing self-overwriting that makes instability, erasure, and transformation the very conditions of existence.