Exhausting Environments Urban Installation(s) and the Green City

Drawing on the ‘green’ installations Wave in Seoul and Marble Mound Arch in London, this chapter argues that the temporality, mediatisation and positioning of urban remedies to digital exhaustion points us to the entanglement between exhaustion and the environment. Both of these installations take up the theme of bringing ‘nature’ into the urban - one via a digital installation, the other via a physical construction. The temporality of the installation and permanency of their (re)mediations turns the distinction between connection and disconnection into a spatial practice. Rather than offering a new entry point to experiencing nature in the urban, the installations are folded back into the logics of a constantly connected and constantly commodified urban life. Displacing the longing for ‘connection’ - to nature as much as to each other - not only into the urban but into the commercial and commercialised urban centre, these installations become exhausting environments themselves.