Animals on the Verge (2024)

Animals on the Verge combines Google’s ready-made 3D animals, considered a “perfect quarantine activity,” juxtaposed with drawings of holes on white paper, via Augmented Reality on a mobile phone. Animals stand tentatively at the edge of giant holes in the earth, sometimes treading water in or down in the holes. Some of these holes are gas emission craters, where melting permafrost releases enormous volumes of trapped gas in an explosive crater-forming event, or the infamous Gates of Hell in Turkmenistan—a fiery crater left burning since a 1971 Soviet drilling accident. The animals appear trapped in a glitch and unable to cross, but unharmed and waiting in limbo.