Read Dr. David Watkins paper for our collaborative project here

Read Dr. Ruth Jones paper for our collaborative project here

For Sluice Seyðisfjörður 2025, Dr. Ruth Jones and Dr. David Watkins will present “ Future Ruins and New Worlds“, a collaborative artist's book that explores the speculative and emergent nature of world-building. Drawing on Seyðisfjörður’s volatile environment, shaped by geological instability, climate, and limited resources, the project reflects on fragile worlds formed through the intersection of human and nonhuman forces.

This artist's book resists conventional hierarchy and narrative structure, inviting the reader to co-construct new worlds with each interaction. Composed of intersecting theories, part deconstructed academic paper, part pulped speculative fiction, Future Ruins and New Worlds explores the shifting (mis) alignments at intersections where multiple actants embark on the messy work of world-building in collaboration. The project critiques authoritarian global narratives while offering space for reimagining possibilities, collaboration, and resilience.
 
Jones' practice explores the visibility and agency available to women through mesmeric world building, while Watkins investigates networks, from global infrastructures to ecological systems like the Wood Wide Web. Future Ruins and New Worlds will use Seyisfjörour's context as a setting and a metaphor for precarious, emergent systems, each page an act of ongoing reformation that de-centers human agency and foregrounds entanglements. Each world built is particular to the entity that experiences it.

Visit David Watkins website: www.davidwatkins.co.uk and Instagram: @david_s_watkins

The Maintenance

The Maintenance

To build a world. You’re in it, it’s there, it exists. It exists teetering on a knife edge, wave forms about to collapse, futures and fates in the balance, everything needs doing and it needs doing now. You can’t find those who are interested, who might help you, who might care, it seems only those who wish to tear everything down are present, the loudest. And you’re tired, and you have to maintain so much; your relationships, belongings, income and this world; you barely have any say in how it was constructed and you barely have the energy and yet it needs you. It needs your care, your energy, time and love. No one is interested and no one cares. Why should you? It’s all you have. It will have to do.  

Hierarchies present themselves in your mind, hierarchies that were never present for the building. It was built concurrently by so many and branched and branched beyond imagining. Everything, everywhere, all at once. But the chronological nature of time that you experience as an individual, forces you to choose one thing over another, forces you to choose what to focus on first, then next, then last, then over again. Maintenance staving off decay and collapse. This tightrope you walk to maintain your world, sometimes you slip, sometimes someone else catches you, sometimes someone tries to push you off. This fragile equilibrium is hard won. But winning is an illusion because you need to start all over again, tomorrow, next week, month, year.
Controlled collapse. Some things can be decommissioned, in your mind’s eye you’d be able to oversee its de-commission, control how it collapses, ceases to be, what is salvageable from the rubble, can be used to shore up other precarious elements of your world. But collapses, slumps, breakages, they all happen suddenly and you’re left with damage control. But you can’t control the damage.

And in the middle of all this, you’re expected to live, and more than live, love. How are you supposed to live, laugh, love in these conditions? Trite sayings and gallows humour prop up your failing capacity to cope.

There is no glamour, there is no reward, there is no thanks for the ongoing, everyday labour of keeping the world going. Of caring, of maintaining. There’s no glory in cleaning. But there’s no world without it. There’s disease and death. Saving a life through glorious means, the heroic individual, but no one ever said thank you for cleaning the dishes, the toilet, did that save a life?  Taking out the trash. The sour ball of every revolution according to Ukeles. Saving lives by increments, cleaning every day, week, month, year, decade. Cooking, raising families, going to work, keeping the economy going, paying taxes. It’s all on you. Every day. And like the laundry, you can’t ever win, just when you’ve done it all, it starts again.

The Build

The Build

To build a world, in your mind, to have the time, the energy the space. To build a world, to imagine freely, to idly while away the time. No other duties, no other responsibilities, no accountabilities. No one needs you, no emails, no notifications. No outstanding bills, concerns or requirements. Relief washes through you. Now there’s stillness, quietness, emptiness.

The stillness grows, slowly, you can feel your surroundings settling, creaking, clinking. Expanding. Moving inexorably outwards. You can’t see it, but you imagine it. As your capacity to sink into the gentle emptiness around you grows, you feel your awareness stretch into the potential around you. Quiet, but not silent. Edges and boundaries not yet discovered, tentatively searched for.

Next to you, another entity, you hear their breathing, sense their presence. They hear you, too. You begin to match your breath with theirs, slow, even. Together, you return your consciousness to the space around you. There are others here. You resist alarm at this discovery, your breath hitching, before settling back into rhythm. Soon you notice that each entity present is breathing in synchronicity.

Stretching out together, you extend your senses again, meeting a weak resistance. Testing, tasting, touching, exploring, you seek out the edges of that resistance, mapping its contours, it’s surface tension. You could break it, but you choose not to, working with it instead. Collectively you enfold it into your imagination of the space.

Calmly, purposefully, all the entities around you begin to focus their senses; smelling, feeling, hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, imagining. They are not like you. Some are large, huge, far, far larger than you. Some are smaller, tiny, wiry, robust. Others: soft and gelatinous. Hard carapaces. Fibrous stems. Reaching tendrils. Slow, resonating rhythms of oxygen exchange.

Growing around you, between and through gaps, over and underneath, a charge. Bridging gaps, earthing, crackling off again. You feed on the charge, animating your excitement, the possibilities surrounding you, arcing off each entity, connecting you all together, fusing, galvanising your intent. A shared purpose.

Gradually, by increments, you become aware of the growing saturation of colour all around you. You can’t make out the space you are in, the world you are imagining in concert with all these other entities, but you are bathed in colour. Warm. Comfortable. Uninhibited.

The colour becomes bright, brighter than bright and obliterates your vision from the edges in. In its place afterburn pinpoints abruptly trace the pattern your eyes make as they try to situate you in space, searching for your companions.

Gentle undulations manifest before you, soft peaks, shallow valleys, moderate, temperate. A tranquil scape. Unsure of its composition, liquid or solid, non-Newtonian fluid perhaps, changed by observations, changing observers, you let your vision pull your imagination on a journey through this unknown. Intuiting your fellow entities behind you, engaged in this same speculative journey, you each begin to manifest your imaginings into the landscape. Beginning the process of push and pull, you, your friends, the scape itself, collaborate: discarding, altering, improving, sharing, building.

A lull. This isn’t permanent, it’s malleable and amenable. Mentally, you place a pin in it, like a destination you wish to visit or a location you’ve been on a map. You notice each of your fellow beings withdrawing. You too feel less urgency now this shared world has been brought into being, content to replay the sensations and thoughts that guided it into being at a later date.

Easing into your consciousness again, a quiet ticking, the discreet background hum of electronics, the chime of a text message, the soft rumble of traffic passing by…gently settling on your shoulders the weight of responsibilities, you shift out of the nebulous imaginative sphere you shared with many others, lingering memories of colour and sound and connection begin to ebb away.