Hypertrash

Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon

VR Installation

2020

Our way of life consists of a huge accumulation of waste. Permanent change leads us to throw away clothes, food, packaging, furniture, newly constructed buildings, entire cities, agricultural overproduction... Waste takes on geographical dimensions : the drift of plastic in the middle of the ocean reaches the size of a continent, chemicals mix with rivers, garbage dumps near big cities rise higher and higher, forming mountains in Rio, Delhi or New York... Our way of life has contaminated our very environment : we now live inside the waste.

To visit this environment, we use the most immersive technique : Hypertrash is a virtual reality movie. It proposes a world tour of waste. We make a device to be submerged in this living environment. A dive into the universe of waste, showing the manifestations of this global accumulation.

The environment that is shown is global, without borders. The montage jumps syncopationally from one country to another, from one situation to another, always remaining within this immense mass of rejected objects and materials. The film does not focus on a particular local situation ; the places shown are not necessarily identifiable : what matters is the feeling of immersion in the waste.

Waste videos

We produce the panoramic film Hypertrash from videos collected on the Internet, in the same way that we have already produced several films and installations. from recovered videos (Cyborgs in the Mist, Globodrome, Dance Party in Iraq, World Brain, Erewhon...).

The film combines recovered and shot images: we film in RV in different places (landfills and waste treatment plants). It is then a question of assembling these materials into a coherent whole through editing. The film produced can also be broadcast without RV headphones, for example in a version adapted specifically for the site of the Museum of the World in Transition.