How can we perceive History?
Starting from this question, the work takes one of current technologies “fittest” designs to explore historical developments in technology, science, art and culture by creating a “time-sculpture”, which utilises the principle of a dynamic archive. By doing so, it scrutinizes human time-perception and history and takes as an approach to simulate history’s artificial timeframe at a scale, perceivable by humans.

A textual starting point for the work consists of two dimensions: first, an archeological analysis of media artifacts, following Siegfried Zielinski’s notion of “deep time” and second, a geological aspect arguing with Jussi Parikka. The concept of “deep time” explores dynamic time-processes in a vertical and a horizontal search algorithm, opposed to a linear idea of cause and effect. Deep time is therefore rhizomatic complex, process-based and implies historical contingent developments without a clear start and end. The second aspect is the transfer of the archeological idea to geological realms. Following Parikka’s ideas, media artifacts are qualified by specific materials and minerals, which – to use Parikka’s term – “catalyze” our social, economic and media thinking. Sediments, in this context, represent different geological time frames, “shaped and hardened by history” (Manuel De Landa (1998) Thousand Years of Nonlinear History). These rocky layers thus allow us to browse in history like in a book – a geological archive so to say.

​

​