Feral Atlas

Upon first encountering the name and visiting the website, Feral Atlas struck me as an encyclopedia concerning nature or the untamed.

However, once I truly delved into the Drawer, I came to understand that each segment resembled a collective of ecosystems or ecological environments. With each exit and re-entry, the content on the page would refresh randomly, a design aspect I greatly admire.

I randomly chose to explore the toxic fog section and was presented with a miniature model of a city. I found this mode of representation quite intriguing. One of the challenges in acknowledging environmental shifts or the roots of natural degradation in our daily lives is our compartmentalization. We are segmented into tiny compartments, with subways, cars, and public transport linking these compartments through another enclosed mobile space, fostering a divide and atomization among individuals and between humans and their environment. The interconnections between numerous events seem exceedingly delicate amidst this fragmentation. This visualization amalgamates all societal phenomena onto a metaphorical "integrated circuit," where the operational logic of each component is intimately connected to another.

When I zoomed in on this image, some interactive nuggets appeared. For example, in toxic fog's detail, I saw that heavy metals permeate every corner of the city with factory emissions. These hidden phenomena are visualized with the author's art.

Another interesting thing was the way the drawers were categorized. I really like the way it is categorized in a cycle from Invasion, Empire, Capital, Acceleration, which suggests the steps and extensions under the expansion of capitalism.

For example, the bottom of this image shows how, in the last century, imperialist invaders expanded step by step, accumulating raw capital, expanding their markets, and so on. Of course, in the age of neoliberalism, all of this looks to be packaged into each of our lives in a whole new way.