Deep-time decay

Type | Sculpture/research-through-design    Year | 2023    Project site | Rotterdam, Netherlands

Client | self-initiated / funded by Stimuleringsfonds 

Deep Time Decay is a project that examines the role of design in contemporary society and its potential influence on the future. By fabricating, deconstructing, and fossilizing a speculative hydrogen machine, the project challenges the traditional view of design as a solution-oriented field and encourages alternative methodologies that take into account the interconnectedness of technical products and the broader ecological systems they are embedded in. Through a gaze into the archaeology of the future, Deep Time Decay works to redefine the premises of power and control that underlie our material culture and its extractive connotations. At the brink of ecological collapse, the project challenges the hero narrative often associated with technology.

Expanding the agency of Design in Deep Time means exploring the fabrication of collateral, overlapping, and multiscale narratives and stretching its definition into the unknown. From the geological tensions that crystallize raw materials in the earth’s crust to the decomposition and fossilization of the technosphere’s dust in the future, materials unfold over millions of years. We grasp this continuous flow of materials in shapes and objects for an instant. Ultimately, the promise of a different future lies in the fragility and care for the fragments we leave behind. It lies in the perpetual rediscovery of an archeological present and the embrace of the ephemeral nature of our material relations.