The Great Filter is a work about mortality and impermanence. To illustrate this grand theme, I aim to create a model of a city in the process of decaying, constructed out thousands of “structures” moulded in sand. The collapsing forms are reminiscent of houses being reclaimed by the desert. The work has a striking fragility, yet also a sense of eternity that makes it strangely compelling. 

Inspired by the work of research centre’s such as Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford University) I have devoted my attention to existential threats and global catastrophic risk. These topics may at first seem to belong in the field of science fiction, but revile themselves to be of utmost relevance in our contemporary world. The risks caused by pandemics in the 21 century is certainly something everyone can relate to.

I have borrowed the term The Great Filter from the economist and philosopher Robin Hanson, who describes the limits of a society’s evolution as the existence of ‘the great filter’. Hanson described the probability – or improbability – of the development of intelligent life as a curve with a natural end. Is the evolution of intelligent life infinite? Why have more traces of life in the universe not been found? This is a paradox in which intelligent life can be seen to cause its own destruction. If we turn our inability to reach a collective, global consensus on a sustainable future, everything would seem to point that way.