Deep-time decay

Type | sculpture/installation research-through-design

Year | 2022

Project site | IPKW, Arnhem (NL)

Exhibited at Dutch Design Week 2022 with the support of Creative Industries Fund NL.

Deep Time Decay is a project that investigates the role of design in our current society and its potential impact 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 on redefining the premises of power and control that underlie our building 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 multiscalar 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 for millions of years in time. 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 re-discovery of an archeological present and the embracement of the ephemeral nature of our material relations.