“Persistent objects explores our relationship with technology in a context of accelerated development, leading to increasing obsolescence and unsustainable innovation. The work aims to challenge our perception of technology as purely functional entities, looking into their materiality, and their need for preservation and future innovation potential. It explores this simple paradox: how (not why) can the natural, in its impermanence, care for the unnatural, with its strange deep time – biomaterials trying to keep safe technological objects which, normally, need decades or even centuries to decompose?
This impossible archive for 20 technological artifacts, each functional in its own right, questions the relationships between identity and care, in a world that is essentially more-than-human, both in a natural and technological sense. The installation, built upon a taxonomical, historical and chemical research into the 20 objects, explores their identities. While the objects themselves are kept anonymous to the public eye and ephemerally safe under bioplastic vestures, in a rigid grip overtaking the museum floor, their material identities are detailed in the video work, showing their most basic components.”
Text: Andrei Tudose
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Persistent objects was comissioned by Marginal, in the framework of Places of Care project, which recontextualises the way we look at and connect to technology. The project builds a sense-breaking context, as each artwork developped during the project imagines new ways of interacting with and relating to technological artifacts and the man-made ecosystems around them. Reversing the zooming out strategies that we employ to be able to navigate the over-technological world around us, the research & artworks developped and exhibited in the framework of Places of Care re-frames technology in an attempt to reset our relationship with it – by understanding its history, rethinking the way we create its identity, or the way we interact with it on an emotional level as well as the ecological implications, not only in relation to the natural environment, but also with the other human-made systems.
