How will they know there’s no-one left

From a nightmare, sprung, quite literally, the impetus behind our first peepshow artists’ book, How will they know there’s no-one left.

An empty forest, in which no wildlife roamed, rootled nor had inhabited nor pollinated for a long while, was masked by AI simulations of wildlife inhabitants. Chipping away at the edges, replacing the missing with projection, for how long had this been so? What lay beneath the mirage was a landscape devoid of rich, biodiverse life, and this gave root to the abandoned stage which reveals itself to the reader upon peeping through the central hole. As the red curtain falls, it dawns, the stage is empty, the set abandoned.

The full moon, at journey’s end, now crescent, yet still no rustle of wildlife, furred, scaled, or otherwise. How will we, any of us, know what we have lost, when entire ecosystems crumble?