Opuntia

In Anthropocene, Sheldrick presents a series of generative AI video artworks that signify the fast and pervasive changes occurring in today’s human-driven evolutionary epoch. Each of these 25 micro-views of the natural world highlights the rapidly interconnected changes happening on our planet, and prompt reflection of humanity's impact.

While Earth's geological eras are typically measured in millions of years, the Anthropocene – or ‘new human era’ – has emerged with startling immediacy and change. Though the formal recognition of this epoch is still debated, the evidence of human influence is unmistakable: from the depletion of the ozone layer and the sprawling Great Pacific Garbage Patch, to the alarming rates of forest and jungle loss. These large-scale devastations on the intricate network of this world are driven by human activity that extends in ways that mirrors our evolution: swift, extreme, and reaching to every corner of this planet.

The pieces in this series visualize how the world evolves in the Anthropocene, using small and natural subjects to suggest that nothing remains unaffected – nothing is in isolation. Whether through direct environmental degradation, a butterfly-effect chain of events, or the transfer of unseen energies – even the tiniest elements of our world are vastly and quickly changing, from flora and insects to seemingly untouched landscapes and geological elements.

Anthropocene captures the disorienting yet sensorial nature of this transformation with nearly psychedelic or supernatural intensity, where rapidly pulsing forms morph and dissolve into one another, creating new patterns and removing the apparent separation between subjects. The visceral nature of these visuals may feel both chaotic and harmonious, infinite and intimate – an enveloping experience that accentuates the interconnectedness between all matter.

The speed of change portrayed in Sheldrick's generative videos contrasts sharply with the perceived slowness in notable works that also explore the relative nature of time and transformation. The gradually melting clocks in Salvador Dalí’s barren landscape The Persistence of Memory (1931), and the eight-hour continuous film shot of the Empire State Building in Andy Warhol’s Empire, each offer slow and meditative reflections on time's passage. Similarly, On Kawara’s Today Series, which spanned nearly 50 years and over 2,000 date paintings, underscores the persistence of time's markers as a reminder of the wildly variable occurrences within such spans. These works, with their deliberate pacing, end up accentuating the frenetic tempo of modern life that people experience directly – while Sheldrick's series suggests that the pace of change may be much faster than we can even comprehend.

Whether an encounter with the works of Anthropocene triggers a memory or provides a new perspective, their intense sensory experience induces an underlying awareness that everything affects everything else, and that humanity’s impact is both pervasive and yet a vastly microscopic occurrence within this universe.