Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace
Interactive sound installation at DIS 2025
At DIS 2025 in Madeira, the installation Sunk Costs explores the shipwreck of the Felicity Ace through sound, sculpture, and speculative storytelling on global logistics and ecological fallout.- Type
- Opening
- Location
- Funchal, Madeira, Portugal DIS 2025 Conference
From July 5–9, 2025, the interactive sound installation Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace will be presented at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference in Funchal, Madeira.
The project explores the 2022 shipwreck of a luxury car carrier as a speculative site of logistical failure, ecological transformation, and financial abstraction. Using spatialised audio, sculptural debris, and responsive headphones, the piece immerses visitors in a fragmented evidence room of submerged value, capitalist excess, and material afterlives. Created by an international team of artists and researchers—Jamie Allen, Louise Carver, Matt Lutz, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, and Chris Woebken—the work bridges artistic research and critical infrastructure studies to reframe catastrophe as a systemically distributed phenomenon.
The installation emerges from ongoing research developed through the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) projects Cycles of Circulation and Ground Tests, which investigate material infrastructures, planetary logistics, and the aesthetic politics of environmental systems.