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Speculative Morphological Assemblages from Canhedonia's Wetlands: A Queer Ecology within the Animated Film The Spire™

Original title: Speculative Morphological Assemblages from Canhedonia’s Wetlands: A Queer Ecology within the Animated Film The Spire™

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This isn't a health study — it's a description of an experimental animated art film that imagines a fictional polluted future world where trash, microbes, and living things merge into strange new creatures. While creative and thought-provoking about pollution's effects, it doesn't contain actual scientific findings about human health or microplastics.

This practice-enabled research presents a series of stills from the authors’ forthcoming experimental, generative AI film, The Spire™. Set in the not-too-distant future realm of Canhedonia, a polluted wetland bleeds into the edges of an industrial megacity. Within this eroding wetland–city threshold, morphological assemblages blur ontological distinctions of human and non-human, nature and culture, and animal and object. Human-made artefacts, flotsam and detritus from nearby industrial excess, combine with microbial life, plastic pollution, animal and human DNA, proteobacteria, and cultural paraphernalia to form fused and agglomerated entities.

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