Ashnihilation

Ashnihilation was a site-responsive augmented-reality artwork commissioned through Plymouth City Council's Green Minds programme with European Regional Development Fund support. Experienced through Microsoft HoloLens headsets on Plymouth Hoe, the work transformed Smeaton's Tower into a virtual ash tree and used the familiar landmark as a point of entry into the ecological consequences of ash dieback.

Presented in September 2022, the project combined immersive digital imagery with public engagement to reimagine the Hoe through threatened and speculative ecologies. By overlaying a living, vulnerable organism onto a durable civic monument, Ashnihilation brought together natural and technological forms of seeing while raising awareness of changing urban environments and the loss of ash trees across the South West.