"An evocative artwork that explores materiality and form through an abstract and open-ended visual language."
-------- Review from Future Art & Design Award
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Project description
Specimens of Time" is a sculptural installation that constructs a microcosm of post-human civilization. Interlinked hemispheres of transparent glass and reflective stainless steel capture and preserve fragments of ourselves and our memories, while also mirroring the viewer's present presence. The moment resin solidifies is not merely a physical arrest of time, but a metaphor for the state of our civilization—images overlap and converse within the transparent medium, as if reality is in constant, quiet dialogue with its digital twin.
Randomly connected spheres of varying sizes create fractal patterns across time. Resembling both distant planets and man-made satellites, they suggest that technological objects have quietly evolved into a new form of nature. Metal particles drift in interstitial spaces, while silicon-based forms woven from threads and glass beads seek their shapes within mazes of QR codes. Together, these heterogeneous elements perform the self-generation and regeneration of complex systems, mirroring the deep interplay between time and technological evolution.
The work's surface-level decorative aesthetics create tension with its underlying critical consciousness. Proliferating visual symbols refract the cognitive overload of our highly informatized era, while the fragmentary, window-display mode of presentation echoes our increasingly fragmented perception—we no longer immerse ourselves in complete narratives, but hop between shards of information.
"Specimens of Time" is both a meditation on technological destiny and a poetic inquiry into civilization's possible paths forward. As biological and digital logics permeate each other, and memories begin to dwell within matter as data, these preserved moments invite us to reflect: in an age where boundaries between human and machine, organic and inorganic, are blurring, what remains at the core of our humanity worth cherishing? These slices of time, eternally suspended within transparent matter, may be the very proofs of existence we strive to hold onto amidst the digital deluge.