Porsche SCOPES

“Thousands of years ago — a heating plant once stood in this place. Since then civilizations have risen and fallen and only remnants of the place that once was can be glimpsed in the sand, uncovered by the desert wind. Welcome to REMNANT, an interactive installation and lounge area providing a multisensory experience in sound, light and form.”

SCOPES Stockholm was a three-day-long festival celebrating local pioneers within art, design, music, tech and social. After Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Singapore and Tel Aviv, the festival landed for the first time in Stockholm and took place in an old heating plant called Värmeverket in Bredäng on May 26-28th 2023.

Together with light and sound designer Daniel Araya we created on of the three main spaces for the festival: designed as a multi-sensory experience on the theme of Värmeverket – the building housing the festival – depicted 10 000 years in the future. The space functioned as a lounge area by day, with relaxed seating, panel talks and a variety of installations. By evening it was transformed into a dancefloor on an alien world – accomodating the variety of DJs and bands playing there.

Inspired by depictions of derelict cities in popular culture with an added touch of science-fiction, the foundation for the space was a selection of large concrete blocks and drill cores coming from the building itself, forming impromptu seating throughout the space. Extra-terrestrial-looking vegetation of unclear origin; palm trees, seeds in different stages of growing and anemone-like shapes were all 3D-printed and filled the room with a natural serene yet unfamiliar feeling.

Complete with a tunnel entrance, an interactive sound installation broadcasting sounds from the desert mixed with distorted drum rythms, lasers and a looming asteroid animation overhead as the main light source – the space aimed to depict a chain of events together forming a larger setting, giving festival-goers a feeling of stepping into a distant, far away world.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert ... near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

The poem “Ozymandias”

written by Percy Shelley in 1818 provided

the main inspiration for the space.

During the day

when the sun was still up

the space functioned as an escape from the hectic festival with a

lounge area complete with panel talks on a wide array of topics,

Nighttime the mood changed.

The sun went down and the moon rose

while music increased in volume and space was cleared for a dancefloor.

After billions of years of research and development,

failures are fossils,

and what remains hold the secret to our survival.

A variety of extra-terrestrial plants where 3D-printed: geometrically twisted palm trees, seeds in different stages of growing and large coral-like shapes. The objects functioned both as furniture, decoration and as storytellers in the larger setting of the space.

Utilizing bioinspired design methodologies and the cutting edge technology of large scale additive manufacturing (LSAM), each and every one of the objects printed retain their own unique individual shape in relation to each other, showing the plant’s growth cycle from a small seed to a fully fledged palm tree.