Arkadius: Ocean Cleaners is a call for action.

After two years of planning, analysis, and eco-activism, Antares unveils the Arkadius Fleet, a fictional 10-ship formation designed to gather floating waste lost to the currents in the oceans. The project aims to create discussion around anthropogenic (human made) pollution, its causes, and possible outcomes.

Oceanic garbage patches did not form overnight. They are the result of decades of wasteful consumerism and an ever-expanding catastrophe that is already having a deep impact on marine biodiversity. Most floating trash aggregates are made of fishing nets and plastics, slowly decaying under sunlight and saltwater. Breaking into particles often mistaken by marine life for food, they end up falling to the bottom of the ocean, eroding into microplastics. Those then travel with the currents and contaminate the entire water cycle, which means… all fauna, humans included, drink plastic. 

This is an ecological emergency that nations are failing to address. Despite the irreparable damage to global biodiversity caused by the contamination of water supplies, military spending remains at an all time high, reaching $2’240 billion USD in 2022. We believe that this money should have been spent on shifting the agricultural and energy sectors towards a less wasteful and more virtuous production model, preventing the accumulation of garbage in the first place.

Something came with the currents.

Through those grave elements of context, we wanted to draw an optimistic perspective in which the mass production of high-grade military equipment could be upcycled into state-of-the-art garbage-collecting boats. In a future where nations could cut an end to their imperialist projections, Arkadius: Ocean Cleaners depicts the becoming of their maritime fleets: Ten chimaeras built from the remains of death machines.

To create the Fleet, our design team followed naval architecture courses at the Paris-Belleville Architecture School (ENSAPB) and studied blueprints of modern military vessels. That long process led to the imagination of a quintet of ships, deploying tethered filters between them to scoop up all kinds of floating trash. The “Arkadius” Mothership stands at the centre of the formation, and like a whale shark, swallows and packs garbage into containers and brings it back to shore to be treated. The five tether ships are accompanied by a plethora of support ships, such as a submarine to map out the patches from below, filter carriers, and little shuttles to pull the larger debris away from the filtering nets. 

From an artistic standpoint, we worked to create a mesmerising condensate of aesthetic devastation to help visualise pollution that remains very unspectacular. As only a portion of garbage sticks to the surface (most of it stagnates at about a metre under it), it is incredibly challenging to grasp the volume accumulating in the oceanic gyres. We decided to pull most of the debris to the surface for players to get a clearer picture of the titanic scale of the task, the weight of our responsibility as a civilisation. Through our work, we came to the conclusion that garbage collection initiatives are only a partial solution to a much wider problem that goes beyond waste management and interrogates our very production model.

This map contains:

➤ The Arkadius and its fleet, a massive garbage collecting boat formation that surrounds patches with thin nets and recycling stations. Use each ship as a remote base to improve your gear and drop off your resources, or grab a fresh vehicle in their hangars!

➤ 7 exclusive vehicles: the Recon, Heavy Duty and Civil helicopters, as well as the VTOL Jet, the Submarine, the Hovercraft and the Speedboat.

➤ 10 themed skins (Captains, Technicians, Diving gear, Hazmat suits, Jet pilot, Helicopter pilot)

➤ A very large play area, filled with custom biomes, shipwrecks, remote bases, hidden locations to loot and explore.

➤ Original soundtrack by Studio Cosmophone (background ambient and a new music disc) to accompany you while as you play.

➤ A redesigned survival experience: Use the garbage patch and all its resources to make it through the next day, no more caving nightmares!