Victoria Hertel

Tides (2024)

Kiln-fused marine pollution glass, custom printed circuit board, time of flight sensor, 3D printed PETG casing, light waves

Size varies

Building on my 2021 Travelogue contribution, Tides deepens the exploration of overconsumption’s environmental impact, first captured through photographs of washed-ashore items on Singapore’s East Coast Park. This iteration of Tides features a crystalline ‘nicho’—a Latin American folk art shrine commemorating events and spiritual connections—crafted from marine pollution glass fragments collected from the same shores. Inside, a sensor-driven tea light dims and brightens with visitors’ presence, honouring the cyclical ebb and flow of nature. Merging cultural expression with tech-mediation, this mini ocean shrine reflects on spiritual rites, presence, and memory, paying homage to ecological rhythms.

Victoria Hertel Velasco is a Singapore-based German-Venezuelan installation artist whose practice focuses on sensory awareness, perception technology, and our ecological entanglement, as a way of reconciling current human behaviour with environmental over-extension.

Her techno-organic work combines sensor systems and natural phenomena to create experiences that emphasise the interconnectedness of diverse material networks, be they biological, digital, electro-mechanical, or ritualistic—ultimately fostering deeper care for our shared co-existence and kinship with everything ‘else’. This commitment to sustainable networks extends to her production methods, which involve collaborating with local maker-spaces, utilising found objects, and opting for renewable energy sources for her installations.