Toxic Ride
Set on the abandoned Occidental Jetty of Canvey Island, an area shaped by both oil refineries and seaside leisure, Toxic Ride is a dystopian fairground installation that highlights this contradiction. The ride functions as an analogue sound machine, with its track and vehicle generating a dissonant musical loop composed of tritones. The result is an unsettling, immersive experience that amplifies the absurdity of holiday spots set beside industrial toxicity on Canvey Island.
Bartlett School of Architecture
Speculative design
Installation
Animation
Brief
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Objective
Find the perfect plan tailored to your needs, offering the right balance of features, flexibility, and value to help you achieve your goals effortlessly.
Period
Find the perfect plan tailored to your needs, offering the right balance of features, flexibility, and value to help you achieve your goals effortlessly.
Site
Canvey Island, a reclaimed island in the Thames estuary in Essex, hosts two opposites in close proximity: the toxicity of its oil refineries and its theme parks and holiday spots. It was the site of the world’s first delivery of liquefied natural gas by container ship and later became central to risk assessments around residential proximity to petrochemical infrastructure. The 1.6 km long abandoned TTY becomes a symbol for the site’s petrochemical history merging with the residents’ everyday life.
Algorithmic Composition
To amplify this dystopian atmosphere, a piece of unsettling music was composed by translating the refinery’s map into sound frequencies. A pixelated height map of the refinery was generated, and an algorithm was used to convert the RGB data of pixels to sound frequencies. The generated tunes were structured into a riff containing dissonant tritones, the musical interval also known as "the devil in music", to be repeatedly played by the instrument.
The Music Machine
With the aim of constructing an interactive experience with this melody, a musical machine was designed as an instrument to play the riff. This took form of a monorail fairground vehicle located on the abandoned jetty. As the vehicle moves, the melody is played by the strings attached to the sides of the monorail.
Interactive Model
