Newark, New Jersey, 2024.
The building had stood abandoned since 1992. Once home to the offices of the Financial Benefit Insurance Company, it was left deserted after the company suddenly went bankrupt amid the recession. For decades, no one had set foot inside. That changed when a real estate developer, interested in purchasing the property, began exploring its rooms one by one. Eventually, he found himself in the basement, at the end of a long corridor, in the archives room. As he restored power to the building, the hum of fluorescent lights flickered to life, joined by the faint whirring of old desktop fans. Then came the soft, steady drip of water. He glanced at the dim blue glow coming from an old monitor, but something felt off. The desktop wallpaper wasn’t static—it was gently rippling.
I don’t remember exactly where this idea came from, but I had a vision of a PC monitor being used as an aquarium. Of course, it had to be a CRT monitor, because few fish could survive in a flat screen 🙂 This set the tone for the whole scene: a storage/archive room from a workplace in the nineties. To contrast with the monitor, I chose warm (tan, dark tan, dark orange) and neutral (light/dark bluish grey) colors. Only the chair cushions, in sand green, match the seaweed. The lamp is a typical office lamp (an Anglepoise Lamp), using part 44359 as the lampshade. Other office supplies include a calculator, phone, scissors, cassette tapes, and folders.
Is it a simple screen wallpaper or an actual aquarium? A puddle of water on the ground, hardly noticable up front, answers the question.
A small section of a LED strip was used to light the inside of the screen. A piece of blue filter and a some kind of wrapping foam, cut at the right shape, diffuses the light.
The green computer LED is simply an LED placed behind a trans-green lightsaber piece. Wires are connected to the power supply through a hidden hole in the wall. The light from the lamp was added digitally because an LED couldn’t fit inside. Here are some pictures of the setup. An LED panel, placed on top of the scene behind a plexiglass sheet and some diffusion material, lights up the scene like neon tubes.
