EVENT: CATHERINE SARAH YOUNG (FROM OCTOBER 10 2025, ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA)
Catherine Sarah Young’s Deep Sea Mining Claw Machine
from Friday October 10 2025 as part of “Playground of the Invisible”
curated by Nōvo Collective
venue: Lucky Dip
Shop 56/470 Torrens Rd, Kilkenny SA 5009
Australia
How can a claw machine illuminate the ethics and logistics of planetary extraction?
In Deep Sea Mining Claw Machine, environmental artist Catherine Sarah Young transforms the familiar arcade cabinet into a miniature theatre of ecological speculation. Installed in a public space in Adelaide this October and hosted by Lucky Dip, the work replaces the usual plush toys with handmade “nodule squishies”: soft, toy-like replicas of the polymetallic nodules found on the seabed. Players are invited to manoeuvre the claw, attempting to retrieve these synthetic relics from the machine’s glowing depths.
The installation forms part of “Playground of the Invisible,” the inaugural edition of uncommissioned, a global initiative by Nōvo Collective that commissions site-responsive public art. The project challenges traditional models of cultural production and patronage by situating works outside institutional frameworks, in direct dialogue with public space and local ecology. Rather than being mediated by curators or white cubes, the works appear in everyday environments, where curiosity, confusion, and play intermingle.
Although Deep Sea Mining Claw Machine does not take place within a digital interface, its grammar is unmistakably playful. Young appropriates the ergonomics and aesthetics of arcade play to stage a meditation on extractivism, technological mediation, and environmental desire. The claw’s mechanical precision and random failure mimic the logic of both chance-based entertainment and industrial automation. The viewer’s gestures, meanwhile, echo the anthropocentric impulse to control and extract, transforming escapism into an allegory of ecological exploitation.
Deep Sea Mining Claw Machine exemplifies how the aesthetics and mechanics of play can be recontextualised as tools of critique.
Founded by Rania Daghmoura, Nōvo Collective develops experimental models for commissioning and exhibiting art that interrogate systems of value and visibility. Their new platform, uncommissioned.art invites artists to engage directly with public infrastructures (digital, social, and architectural) rather than responding to institutional briefs. Each edition unfolds as a dispersed exhibition that activates multiple sites and modes of interaction.
A unique example of device art, Deep Sea Mining Claw Machine is on view in Adelaide throughout October 2025 (from Friday Oct 10), presented by Lucky Dip, in collaboration with Nōvo Collective’s uncommissioned platform.
Thanks to Rania Daghmoura for images and information.
Catherine Sarah Young, PhD is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, writer, and scholar. She cultivates an artscience practice by using scientific experimentation and molecular transformations in her art-making, often relating these to planetary and environmental issues. Catherine has an international profile, with numerous fellowships, exhibitions, and speaking engagements. She was one of ArtReview Asia’s Future Greats in 2018, a Thirteen Artist Awards recipient in the Philippines in 2021, was listed as one of the 10 Women Leading the Fight against Climate Change by Earth.org in 2024, and is an Obama Leader for Asia-Pacific. Her PhD dissertation is entitled, ‘The Ghost of Rain: Investigating Petrichor as Companion Molecules in the Critical Zones through the Arts’. She is currently an academic in UNSW Sydney School of Art and Design where she mentors Master of Design students on their capstone projects framed around the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Official website - Instagram