Description:

Substrate is an artbook for a hypothetical videogame that explores the growth of a new ecosystem in an abandoned city. It follows a traveller’s journey as they navigate the strange wilderness growing from the city's empty streets. Exploring recovering ecosystems and how wildlife adapts to the disturbances of urbanisation, Substrate aims to immerse the reader in its world of scrap metal and overgrowth. Through the story and design, this project aims to shift readers’ perspectives on real-world abandoned spaces and the ways we interact with them.
Substrate explores the ways that derelict places hold value. Readers are taken on a journey that demonstrates the setting’s beauty, the ways it provides shelter, the joy of exploration, and how decay acts as a wellspring for new life.
Long-term abandoned land can harbour plants and animals that struggle to survive elsewhere. The creatures of Substrate are designed in conjunction with their environments, creating a fictional ecosystem where creature and habitat are dependent on each other. Environments and the niches they provide are a product both of a place’s own history and of the animals that live there. The city’s streetlights, for example, are powered by hares whose movements rotate the city’s ancient power turbines where they shelter, bringing light into the dark places of the world. The light this provides allows plants to grow and creates new habitats.
The aesthetic design language is influenced by the beauty of real-world ruins. Rust and rot are key elements, appearing throughout both creature and environment designs. This project adopted a deliberately low-fi aesthetic, evoking old video-game graphics, heavily compressed files, static and grain: the visuals of digital “decay”.
But ruins, and especially former sites of industry, are discomforting. They stand as symbols of humanity’s alienation, our separation from the rest of our planet’s life. Our guilt leads us to avoid the places where that conflict is brought to the foreground. But this dichotomous view of humanity and nature as inherently in conflict risks limiting our ability to envision possible futures after we’re gone. Substrate addresses this by bringing the audience into a world where ecosystems have adapted to a changing environment. Reaching beyond the frameworks of “altered” or “damaged” nature, Substrate’s design work explores the changing environment as a collaborative process between city and ecosystem. Seeing continuity in ruin, it envisions a future where the environmental consequences of industrialisation and collapse have sparked new types of growth. Unnatural overgrowth becomes part of the ecosystem, bringing with it its own beauty. Old machinery is kept running by animals whose adaptations intertwine them with the city’s power grid. Fireflies dance in the patterns of long-dead neon signs. The builders of the city may be gone, but perhaps it has some soul of its own that doesn’t care who lives there - only that they live.