Ellen Fritz is a creative technologist forming speculative ecologies and digital dioramas using CGI, game engines, and painting. She collaborates with scientists and engineers, from exoplanet to deep sea vent research, to connect the supposed accuracy of science with the imagination of mythology, and even dissolve the illusion of a boundary between the two. Her simulated environments map connections between theories, mythologies, and creatures considered to be conceptually and temporally distant.

The human mind has always tended towards short-circuitry, inevitably drawing links between distant ideas in effort to understand the unexplained. Ellen aims for her works to function in the same way as the mind: a loose network of association that, through the collapsing of a sphere into a circle, brings the real and fantastic into a new space. By creating speculative digital worlds informed by scientific research and data projections, she aims to visualize branching ecological futures of a post-Anthropocene world. She is fascinated by symbiosis in biology and technology; It not only marks the origin of all life but demonstrates that a connected ecology outperforms solidary entities. Her environments aren’t limited by the constraints of accuracy, truth, and universality– they are speculative microcosms that use historic documentations as input to generate a future.

Right: “Cowboy” (2024) on display, MSD Studio and Gallery.