Genetologic Research

Characteristics of the two types of plastiglomerate. (A) In situ plastiglomerate wherein molten plastic is adhered to the surface of a basalt flow. Field book is 18 cm long. (B) Clastic plastiglomerate containing molten plastic and basalt and coral fragments. (C) Plastic amygdales in a basalt flow. (D) Large in situ plastiglomerate fragment. Adhered molten plastic was found 15 cm below the surface. Note the protected vegetated location.

Recognition of increasing plastic debris pollution over the last several decades has led to investigations of the imminent dangers posed to marine organisms and their ecosystems, but very little is known about the preservation potential of plastics in the rock record. As anthropogenically derived materials, plastics are astonishingly abundant in oceans, seas, and lakes, where they accumulate at or near the water surface, on lake and ocean bottoms, and along shorelines. The burial potential of plastic debris is chiefly dependent on the material’s density and abundance, in addition to the depositional environment. On Kamilo Beach on the island of Hawaii a new “stone” formed through intermingling of melted plastic, beach sediment, basaltic lava fragments, and organic debris. The material, herein referred to as “plastiglomerate,” is divided into in situ and clastic types that were distributed over all areas of the beach. Agglutination of natural sediments to melted plastic during campfire burning has increased the overall density of plastiglomerate, which inhibits transport by wind or water, thereby increasing the potential for burial and subsequent preservation. This anthropogenically influenced material has great potential to form a marker horizon of human pollution, signaling the occurrence of the informal Anthropocene epoch.

According to the geologic timescale, we are currently living in the Holocene epoch. However, Crutzen and Stoermer proposed the term “Anthropocene” in the year 2000 A.D. to represent the period of time between the latter half of the 18th century and the present day. Although other workers have considered the onset of this informal epoch to have occurred at slightly different times, researchers agree that the Anthropocene is a time span marked by human interaction with Earth’s biophysical system. Geological evidence used in supporting this assertion comes from Holocene ice cores and soil profiles. For example, methane concentrations measured in ice cores display an increase of CH₄, which contrasts with the expected decline in CH₄ at that time, based on the orbital-monsoon cycle theory. Ruddiman and Thomson propose in 2001 A.D. that this anomalous rise in CH₄ can be linked to early agricultural practices in Eurasia. In addition, an increase in atmospheric CO₂, as determined from ice cores, was explained by Ruddiman in 2003 as a result of early forest clearance.

Atmospheric compositions and soil management practices are only two indicators of anthropogenic activity, but relatively few examples of solid, human-made materials are preserved in the sediment record. Even rarer are items that are correlatable on a global scale. Given the ubiquity of non-degradable plastic debris on our planet, the possibility of their global preservation is strong. This study presents the first rock type composed partially of plastic material that has strong potential to act as a global marker horizon in the Anthropocene.

Based on a text by Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, Kelly Jazvac

Published in The Geological Society of America.

In 1969, the third man to walk on the moon, astronaut Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr., also became the first lunar archaeologist. As part of the Apollo 12 crew, he examined an earlier robotic lander, Surveyor 3, and retrieved its TV camera, aluminum tubing and other hardware, giving NASA scientists back on Earth the evidence they needed to study how human-made materials fared in the lunar environment.

Conrad examines the unmanned Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which landed on the moon on April 19, 1967. He retrieved its TV camera, aluminum tubing and other hardware. Credit: NASA, Johnson Space Center

Like all astronauts who have visited the moon, Conrad also left behind artifacts of his own. Some were symbolic, such as the U.S. flag. Others were prosaic: cameras, dirty laundry and bags of human waste. NASA’s list of Apollo-related items left on the surface is 18 single-spaced pages. It ranges from geology hammers to earplug wrappers, seismographs to sleep hammocks. Even golf balls belonging to Alan Shepard, who managed some practice during Apollo 14, remain on the moon, though they appear to have escaped the notice of the list makers. All told, six manned landings, two manned orbital missions, over a dozen robotic landings and more than a dozen more crash sites offer signs of a multinational human presence on and around the moon. Each item left behind may seem like a small scrap for a man, but together they offer a giant look at mankind.

“These sites are time capsules,” says Beth O’Leary, an anthropologist at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. They host valuable artifacts for archaeologists and anthropologists who want to study humanity’s growing space heritage. Failed instruments at lunar landing sites, for example, might reveal the engineering or management missteps behind them, the same way the sinking of a ship on earth could tell us something about its commanders or passengers. Archaeologists might even want to study the DNA of microbes in the astronauts’ waste for clues to the diet and health of these early pioneers. “People’s idea is that archaeologists are interested in 1,000 years ago, 100 years ago,” O’Leary says, “but here we’re talking about the modern past.”

The effort may not sound urgent. The moon has almost no air, water or geological activity to corrode or otherwise damage artifacts, but a new generation of missions are headed there and they boost the risk that someone or something will interfere with existing sites. The recent robotic landing by the Chinese National Space Agency, the first controlled landing since the 1976 Luna 24 mission, signals a renewal of sophisticated lunar exploration. This time around, more countries will be involved, as will commercial entities. Private organizations are in hot pursuit of the Google Lunar X Prize, which offers cash rewards for achieving technical milestones, one of which is landing near the Apollo sites.

O’Leary’s interest goes back to 1999, when a graduate student in a seminar she was teaching asked if American preservation laws applied to artifacts left on the moon. O’Leary didn’t know, so she looked into the question, soon discovering that the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prevents nations from making sovereignty claims in space. It does not address, however, the preservation of property that nations have left behind. O’Leary persuaded NASA to fund her research into the topic, and published what she calls the Lunar Legacy Project. She and colleagues created an inventory of the Apollo 11 landing site and began lobbying for its formal protection. By then, private companies such as Lockheed Martin were already discussing taking samples from other lunar sites for study. The hardware itself still belonged to the governments that put it there (the United States and Russia, the primary heir of the Soviet space program), but that would be little consolation if a modern mission ran over the first human footprints on the moon, for example, or moved an object without documenting its original location.

O’Leary helped lobby California and New Mexico, states with strong ties to the space program, to list the Apollo 11 objects in their state historic registers. The move offered symbolic protection and attracted attention to the problem but didn’t do anything to solve it. There was, and still is, nothing to stop new visitors from interfering with objects already in space.  Vandalism probably isn’t the biggest concern, but even unintentional interference is worrisome. Landing near existing sites could damage the sites, in the case of a crash or from the spray of lunar dust and rocket exhaust. “My concern would be that they miss,” says Roger Launius, senior curator of space history at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “If they miss by just a little bit, they could end up landing on top of the site.” And well-meaning archaeologists, though guided by the cultural legacy laws and professional codes wherever they work, do destroy part of what they study as a matter of routine.

Lunar Regolith 70050 sample collected from the moon by the Apollo 17 mission

O’Leary would like the moon sites preserved as long as possible so that future archaeologists, perhaps with more sophisticated instruments and less damaging techniques, can examine them for clues about the human story of the landings. Scientists and engineers also have an interest in preserving the sites: They want to study how equipment left on the moon ages, like they did with the samples Conrad took from Surveyor 3. They also want to resolve questions about moon rocks that couldn’t be answered the first time around, including the size of a patch of orange volcanic glass discovered by geologist Harrison Schmitt during the Apollo 17 mission.

Apollo 17 troctolite 76535. This sample has a mass of 156 grams and is up to 5 centimeters across. NASA/Johnson Space Center photograph S73-19456.

Abstract of article by Lucas Laursen on Smithsonian.com

Leonid Tsvetkov grabs recyclable materials out of dumpsters and trash bins—plastic bottles, Styrofoam take-out packages, cardboard egg cartoons, soda cans and more—puts them in concrete casts, and then leaves them on and around ancient Roman monuments, carvings, and inscriptions. So far, he says, nobody’s noticed them. Can you?

The idea came to him while, as a fellow at The American Academy in Rome, he was exploring the intersections of history, material culture, and consumption as they affect social and physical landscapes from antiquity until today. In his art studies, Tsvetkov realized that much of what we consider to be “artifacts” were trash in antiquity.  Though egg cartons aren’t likely to be considered treasure any time soon, Tsvetkov’s work makes you think twice before sending something to the landfill.  You never know, your old stuff could be a tourist attraction in a couple millennia.

THE GARBAGE PROJECT & “THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF US”  by W.L.Rathje

Between 1987 and 1995, archaeologists from the Garbage Project at the University of Arizona systematically excavated, hand-sorted, measured, and recorded thirty tons of contents from fifteen landfills located across North America — from California to Toronto and from the deserts of Arizona to the everglades of Florida. The information that resulted from these digs was unexpected. In contrast to all of the concern directed at fast food packaging and disposable diapers, the archaeological data demonstrated that both items together accounted for less than 2 percent of landfill volume within refuse deposited over the last ten years. Even more surprisingly, because of industry-wide “light-weighting” — that is, making the same form of item but with less resin — plastic grocery bags had become thinner and more crushable to the point that 100 plastic bags consumed less space inside a landfill than 20 paper bags. If all three items at the center of public concern had been banned and were not replaced by anything, the garbage archaeologists were certain that landfill managers would not have noticed the difference.

At the opposite end of the contents’ spectrum were materials that occupied large portions of landfill space but received little public attention. Construction/demolition debris (C/D) was one. Because of definitional issues, C/D was not even included in the EPA’s national estimates of the refuse that goes to MSW (municipal solid waste, or standard community refuse) landfills. Like the EPA, the Garbage Project tried to avoid the issue of C/D in MSW landfills. In fact, the Garbage Project’s one sampling bias was an attempt to avoid areas where C/D was concentrated because it could easily disable expensive drilling equipment. Nevertheless, C/D accounted for 20 percent or more of excavated MSW by volume and was the second largest category of landfilled materials recovered by the Garbage Project. The largest category occupying landfill space was paper. This was true for refuse buried in the 1980s as well as for refuse dating as far back as the 1950s because in most landfills paper seemed to biodegrade very slowly. As a result, by volume nearly half of all of the refuse excavated by the Garbage Project has been newspapers, magazines, packaging paper and non-packaging paper, such as computer printouts and phonebooks.

Not long after the Garbage Project’s first reports of its landfill digs, the energy directed at passing bans was largely redirected toward “curbside recycling.” A number of communities began placing emphasis on reuse and recycling programs for C/D. Paper recycling promotions often stressed the need to keep paper out of landfills because it didn’t biodegrade as quickly as once hoped. An association of States Attorneys General determined from dig data that several products which claimed to be “biodegradable,” including some brands of disposable diapers and plastic garbage bags, did not biodegrade in landfills, and the false advertising of these products was eradicated. All of this was evidence that some crucial views of garbage held by policy planners, the media, and the public had changed — and that garbology had been validated as a new kind of archaeology.

A RATIONALE FOR THE GARBAGE PROJECT.

For as long as there have been archaeologists, there have been guesses about what these behavioral scientists would discover if they were to analyze their own society’s refuse. While often humorous, such speculations are, in fact, based on a serious rationale: If archaeologists can learn important information about extinct societies from patterns in ancient garbage, then archaeologists should be able to learn important information about contemporary societies from patterns in fresh garbage. The pieces of pottery, broken stone tools, and cut animal bones which traditional archaeologists dig out of old refuse middens provide a surprisingly detailed view of past lifeways, just as all the precisely labeled packages and the food debris and the discarded clothing and batteries in modern middens reveal the intimate details of our lives today. If indeed there are useful things to learn from our garbage — things which can enrich human lives and minimize the undesirable environmental consequences of the industrialized world — why wait until we are all dead and buried to find them out? Garbology now! At least that is what Dr. Bill Rathje and a group of students thought when they founded the Garbage Project at the U of AZ in the Spring of 1973. Today, Rathje and the Project, including co-director Wilson Hughes who was one of the founding students, are still thinking along these same lines.

Over the last 23 years the Garbage Project has literally immersed itself in fresh refuse placed out for collection and in materials exhumed from landfills. Fresh discards are recorded in order to study food waste, what people eat and drink, recycling behaviors, household hazardous wastes, packaging discards, and even the relation between fluoride and tooth decay. In 1987, when the Garbage Project added the excavation of landfills to its research repertoire, investigations focused on the composition of landfilled wastes, the rate of breakdown of these materials within landfills, the contribution of residential hazardous wastes to the leachate (or fluids) which leak out of MSW landfills, and the impact of various waste reduction strategies — recycling, composting, “source reduction” (which just means “using less stuff” in the first place) — on what wastes are landfilled. Today, the Garbage Project’s fresh refuse records, compiled from the long-term ongoing study in Tucson, AZ, and short-term studies in five other cities, form a one-of-a-kind database which currently encompasses 23 years of time depth.
Abstracts of an article originally appeared as Rathje, WL. The archaeology of us. In Ciegelski, C.(ed.), Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Yearbook of Science and the Future–1997 (New York, Encyclopaedia Britannica), 158-177, 1996.

Pierre Bismuth
Today is the Tomorrow of Yesterday-Relaps, 2008

In Today Is The Tomorrow of Yesterday celebrity magazine covers are treated as precious fragments from a long lost civilization.  The artist-archaeologist reconstructs, as it were, selected documents of pop culture as if they were shards of ancient pottery.  The completed collages, with their cracks and gaps and off-center placement, bear the traces of this mock restoration process.

Maarten Vanden Eynde
IKEA Vase, 2010

Ikea-Vase is an amphora-shaped vase made of reconstruction paste and incorporating the fragments of an Ikea mug. The work questions the ability of historical artefacts to truly impress on us what life in an inherently unknowable past would have been like –and in the process points out the fallacious impressions a future archaeologist might conceivably formulate on our present based on its surviving remnants. -Regina Papachlimitzou-

Ikea-Vase (an amphora-shaped vase made of reconstruction paste and incorporating the fragments of an Ikea mug) question the ability of historical artefacts to truly impress on us what life in an inherently unknowable past would have been like –and in the process point out out the fallacious impressions a future archaeologist might conceivably formulate on our present based on its surviving remnants. – See more at: http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/blog/a-fictional-institution-with-an-authoritative-voice-museum-show-part-ii-arnolfini-bristol/#sthash.z4U7k1PT.dpuf

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Contemporary Cavepaintings, Los Angeles, 2007

The first manifestation of human presence and expression of individual touch, was the creation of hand-marks; negative prints of hands, left behind in caves or mountain slopes by spitting white chalk over ones own hands put against the wall. This territorial behavior or expression of individuality is transformed into graffiti and tags in modern urban environment. I used the same iconography and re-introduced the use of basic signatures to delimit territory and preserve personal presence forever.
I looked for modern caves in the city, like bridges and abandoned parking lots, to mark them by spraying white paint over my hands on the wall. This leaves an empty space, a negative being, a void of humanity. A trace of presence is left throughout the city. It questions originality and authenticity and visualizes the quest for eternal fame in the city of the famous.

In his book, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, Dale Guthrie overturns many of the standard interpretations of the ancient cave paintings of the Paleolithic era. Among other things, Guthrie argues that many of the cave paintings were done by children and have similarities with present-day graffiti. Here is an illustration and short excerpt from the book:

Missing Fingers in Art: Ritual, Disease, Frostbite, or Kids Playing?

“Many hand images in the French Gargas-Tibran cave complex and Cosquer and in Maltravieso Cave in Spain appear to have missing fingers or other malformations. These “disfigured” hands have fueled discussions for the last 100 years. Groenen (1987) has provided a review of this debate. The central issue, of course, is that virtually all apparent mutilations are also replicable by simply contorting fingers in the stenciled hand (as one does in shadow art). But many people still insist that these represent real ritual amputations. Meritking

“More recent speculation on possible causes of these disfigured hands has focused on Raynaud’s disease, in which capillaries fail to respond normally by flushing with warm blood when hands or feet get cold. I find this explanation unconvincing, because Raynaud’s disease is seldom expressed in young men (Larson 1996), and the hands with the “missing fingers” are mainly those of young males. Individuals who experience extreme winter temperatures, like cross-country dog-mushers, winter mountain climbers, and so on, do sometimes suffer frozen tissue. Yet, in Alaska, certainly among the coldest well-populated places on earth, complete loss of individual fingers due to freezing is rare. I have never seen one case. Nor have I seen any in my travels in northern Siberia. This is despite the fact that many residents in both places have had multiple experiences of frostbite.

“These Paleolithic images will, no doubt, continue to puzzle and prompt speculation. Having played with making spatter stencils of my own hands, I find the ease with which one can replicate the “maimed-hand look” has left me very convinced that all, or virtually all, were done in fun, especially when we recall that these are largely young people’s hands and appreciate the quick, almost careless, casualness with which they were made. This phenomenon of altering the hand stencil patterns by finger contortion is also well documented from a number of other cultures.”

Michael Johansson
Some Assembly Required – Crescent scale 1:1, 2007

‘As a child I was fascinated by building models. I remember breaking off the pieces from the surrounding plastic sticks that were leftover from the casting process and subsequently gluing the pieces back together in the right order by following the instruction manual. A real bicycle is turned back into a space of imagination’.

Toys ‘r’ us – dinghy scale 1:1, 2006

‘A boat and related equipment are joined together in a welded metal frame. everything is painted in a unifying plastic layer to resemble the surface of a model kit. the real boat is transformed into a model of itself, and its original purpose has given way to something else’. Michael Johansson also made other household equipment like a bed, hairdryer and lawn mower. He even made a diving suit!

Some Assembly Required – Hard Hat Diving, 2011

This DIY art makes me think of the DIY trophies of ply beech wood from the designers of Big-Game.

But they also exist in the regular urban design jungle as cardboard models.

Leonid Tsvetkov

Remnants of our digital discoveries are being dumped worldwide by the millions. After stripping off some valuable metal parts, the left overs are worthless. So called ‘Motherboards’, the main circuit board of a computer have a short life expectancy since new chips are developed with singularitarian speed*. When exposed to a variety of chemical liquids they become alive again. Never before I’ve seen so much beauty in discarded trash. Oil refineries and skyscrapers surround city grids which are overrun by unknown fungi and bacteria. The Russian artist Leonid Tsvetkov creates landscapes which could become ours in a not so distant future, or as he describes it himself: ‘My work focuses on reshaping cultural waste and exploration of social and physical processes. I am interested in the moments where the hard edge geometry of the city becomes organic or there random activity begins to take a highly organized form’.

(*) Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which the future becomes difficult to understand or predict. Nevertheless, proponents of the singularity typically anticipate such an event to precede an “intelligence explosion”, wherein superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds. The term was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity. The concept is popularized by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and it is expected by proponents to occur around 2045.

Paul Ramirez Jonas
Paper Moon (I Create as I Speak), 2007

Consisting of sheets of paper tiled to represent an image of the moon, upon closer inspection, the design is made up of text that reads, “I Create as I Speak.” A single sheet is removed from the wall and rests on a lectern, with a microphone and a portable amplifier, inviting the viewer to interact with the work. The text plays with words; “I Create as I Speak” translates to ABRACADABRA in the ancient Aramaic language.

Toril Johannessen (with Vilde Salhus Røed)
Large and partly spectacular solar eclipse (08.01.08), seen from a hill between our houses, 2008

Damián Ortega
Controller of the Universe, 2007

Damián Ortega’s Controller of the Universe, a series of found hand tools suspended in mid air, is a site of danger and otherworldliness. As if in mid explosion emanating from a center, it appears as though a force of nature has frozen them in time and space.

Cosmic Things, 2002

Hester Oerlemans
Modern Fossils in asphalt, 2003

Recognisable objects like a wind rose, a mobile phone, a key, a pair of scissors, a safety pin, a ring and also words and poems were rolled into the still hot asphalt of the constructed footpath. They are ‘modern fossils’ that carry the past with them in a playful way. Hester Oerlemans collected these ‘fossils’ together with the residents and personnel of nursing home ’t Laar and had them placed over the entire stretch of the two hundred meter long footpath, connecting the new and the old part of nursing home ’t Laar.

Panamarenko
Hofkes, 1967

Three thick sheets of cardboard of about 1m2 are filled with a variety of inorganic trash and debris. From a prophetic kind of future vision Panamarenko nostalgically tries to restore and reconstruct the long lost city-gardens. These city-gardens functioned as urban alternative for life on the countryside and provided additional food for the unfortunate. By the steady increase of city residents (in 2008 a remarkable event took place: the majority of the world population lives now in a city) the necessity to have physical contact with the earth and live from the land is gone. People are used to this new, self-created landscape and recognize the urban environment as their natural habitat.

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Oil Peak, 2006

Oil Peak was produced during the third Enough Room for Space (ERforS) project in Tbilisi, Georgia where the most severe protests since the Rose revolution were taking place. In 2003 the new Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili called back his fellow country men, who fled Georgia in the past decades, to come and help rebuild the once prosperous and wealthy country into a modern western democracy. ERforS decided to respond to this call as well and check out how a new democracy was being introduced or rather implanted and what the side-effects are of such an enormous political and sociological shift. Ten ‘oil eruptions’ were planted on several locations throughout the city. In front of the parliament it caused a surprising commotion as the protesting crowd appropriated the work as a ‘black rose’, symbolizing the failure of the Rose revolution.

Oil Peak, 2008

Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. The concept is based on the observed production rates of individual oil wells, and the combined production rate of a field of related oil wells. According to Mathew Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, “…peaking is one of these fuzzy events that you only know clearly when you see it through a rear view mirror, and by then an alternate resolution is generally too late.” Currently there is no consensus on whether Peak oil occurred already, or is still to come.

Gordon Matta-Clark
Splitting, 1974

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943 – 1978) was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He is famous for his “building cuts,” a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls. Over a period of about three months in 1974, he made two parallel vertical cuts straight through the middle of a nondescript two-story suburban house in Englewood, New Jersey, removing the material left between the cuts as well as some of the foundation blocks on which the house stood so that one half slightly tilted away from the other, creating a wedge-shaped aperture between them.

Doris Salcedo
Shibboleth, 2007

As the very first representative of a non-European tradition to be commissioned by the Tate Modern Unilever Series, Doris Salcedo has chosen an understated technique: that of inscribing into the ground of the Turbine Hall. The scar that begins like a thin, almost invisible line, at the main entrance gradually becomes a chasm in the earth at the far end of the former power station. This earthquake-like insertion evokes the brokenness and separateness of the post-colonial cultures of a non-white, non-European legacy. The installation is a metonymy for the term absence – an absence that negates the space of post-colonial peoples. The construction of a ‘negative space’, or emptied out space, corresponds to the trajectory of the history of post-colonialism. It is in Shibboleth (2007), where space is occupied silently and discreetly, not via a sense of domination or empowerment, that this trajectory can be traced.

An ‘imaginative landscape’ is at work in the heart of what Salcedo states is a monument to a European and modernist tradition of Western art; the Tate Modern. Shibboleth disrupts the Western view of landscape that creates a sense of things being in place and emphasises ‘a visual scape in which the observer stands back and distances himself or herself from the thing observed.’ In reversing the role of the viewer as not only witness but accomplice in an act of silence, Shibboleth proposes a different take on the role of Western art practice and traditions of art: here the earth opens up under the viewers’ feet, evoking an earthquake, an eruption of space, time and place. The view is negated by its downward spiralling motion, bringing to mind a story in Borges’ Labyrinths; negativity has become one with the ground, forcing a glance into an abyss that is disquieting in its silence.

– Abstract from a text by Stella Baraklianou, 2008

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Restauration du Lac de Montbel, 2003

Leo Fabrizio
Swiss Bunkers, 1999-2004

Switzerland is riddled with hidden and disguised military installations. What appeared to be a rock face in a lay-by beside the road were actually steel and concrete doors painted like rock. A five years study by, questioning landscape and identity. Is the territory surrounding us influencing our identity? What happens then when this territory, reputed to be wild and pure, is in fact completely manipulated by humans?

‘After the cold war ended many of the bunkers became obsolete. The tendency is to forget them or even to renounce them, my approach on the contrary, aims to expose them from a new angle. This approach has led me to discover a great number of bunkers, some in remote areas, sometimes difficultly accessible, covering the whole of the Swiss territory. The relations between these basic shaped bunkers and the often-sumptuous landscape surrounds them became an essential part of the study. I looked for the most spectacular bunkers, notable for their camouflage devices, true theatre scenery made with the utmost care. A quality indeed fully Swiss.’ – Leo Fabrizio –

Christopher Locke
Modern Fossil – Asportatio Acroamatis, 2009
(commonly referred to as the Cassette Tape)

‘These Modern Fossils are made from actual archaic technology that was once cutting-edge. Most of these examples were discovered in the United States, although the various species are represented all over the world. It is sad, but most of these units lived very short lives. Most people attribute the shortened lifespan to aggressive predators or accelerated evolution, but this is not necessarily true. It has been shown recently that the true demise of most of these specimens came from runaway consumerism and wastefulness at the high end of the food chain.

This species was first seen in the mid 1960s, but is not widespread until the 1970s. Similar to Repondecium antiquipotacium, it is thought that the compact disc lead to the decline in the Asportatio acroamatis population in the late 1990s. Asportatio has often been found in close proximity to Ambulephebus sonysymphonia, suggesting a close relationship between the two species’.

– Christopher Locke –

Dominaludus Sexagentaquad, 2009
(commonly referred to as the Nintendo 64 Controller or “N64”)

Deferovoculae Cellarius
(commonly referred to as “Cellular Phone” or “Cellphone”. This particular example is a “Motorola Meteor”)