Obsology

Obsology - a neologism coming from a mix of the words obsolescence and archaeology - is an ongoing series of still and animated CGI images by the art collective Fragmentin on the topic of Post-digital archaeology.

Today, every instant of life is recorded and therefore creates a massive amount of data. Paradoxically the survival of those data - and the knowledge they contain - has become uncertain: the electronic consumer devices we daily use which aggregate our data are made of rare and exhaustible metal while the servers designed to store them are over-consuming energy to cool down and are becoming rapidly obsolete over time.

Will our considerations on issues such as digitalization and climate crisis last ? What traces will be left over for future generations to remember ours ? And in which form? In that context, Obsology uses irony and absurdity to feature different scenarios borrowing their aesthetics from our web era. In landscapes where humans seem to have disappeared, objects or symbols - that have emerged from our digital imagery - are staged or sometimes physically anchored into sustainable and "archeological" materials such as glass, textile, stone, wood, shell, ice, rare metal or magma.

This series also underlyingly questions the perennity of Digital Art itself.

Due to climate change, extreme weather catastrophes such as: hurricanes, storms, massive wild fires, floods or volcanic eruptions are becoming more and more frequent. In AD 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius covered the city of Pompeii under 4 to 6 m of volcanic ash, lava and pumice.

Today Pompeii is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, with approximately 2.5 million visitors per year. Most of them have become accustomed to capture with their smartphones the tragic archaeological remains of Pompei. If Mount Vesuvius goes active again tomorrow, what would be the last gesture of those tourists before death ?

More people are dying while taking selfies than being killed by sharks. This data from 2015 and the Wiki list of selfie-related injuries and deaths are highlighting the darkside and absurdity of our time. As with the 'Pompeii Masturbator', which has been conserved for ages under volcanic matter, could lava or magma become the material-solution for storing our digital data and thus leaving a trace for future generations ?

• MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER Viktor, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, Paper- back. 2011)
• LEVY Paul, Digital Inferno: Using technology consciously in your fife and work, 101 ways to survive and thrive in a hyperconnec- ted (Clairview, Great Britain, 2014)

Like an electronic waste dump of obsolete servers, this bunch of shells are left on the sand in a chaotic way. Reminiscent of Ryoji Ikeda black and white audio-visual installations, their external surfaces are displaying moving lines of pure data. What messages are they trying to send us?

In North-California, some seashells have been dated as 40’000 years old. Today, molluscs are displayed in museums like an archaeological artifact, a way to remember the past. The spatha shell from Naqada tomb (1539) showcased in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London is one good example.

In a time of ever increasing data consumption, can these biogenic substances become a new way of storing digital data ? How could the visual aspect of a shell be reduced down to a set of parameters? How to make a link between bivalves shells structural morphology and binary programming language ?

While some data could be stored in their external visible surface, others could be encrypted directly inside their ultrastructural motifs.

Directly inspired by our installation “Your Phone Needs To Cool Down”, this image showcases an army of smartphones, which has just jumped in the water to cool down their temperature. They use - as propellers - an accessory which is normally employed as a fan for humans to escape the hot days of summer. They seem to have evolved to survive global warming and water level rising.

In the context of climate change, technology is often discussed as either a cause or a solution. But how consumer electronics themselves will fare in a future affected by catastrophic global warming ?

The collective imaginary pictures technological devices as entities existing beyond the constraints of their environments. Visions of indestructible robots permeate popular culture, accentuating the notion that these inorganic structures are undisturbed by thermal or electromagnetic radiation. In reality, this is not the case. While some contraptions are designed to withstand extreme conditions, the immense majority of machines we come across are quite vulnerable. For example, most smartphones become unusable in temperatures exceeding 45°C: « iPhone, needs to cool down before you can use it ».

Will society soon find better solutions to recycle consumer electronics and new sustainable ways to store digital data ? Far away from the African e-waste dump depicted by photographer Pieter Hugo in his series, “Permanent Error”.

A drone is quietly flying and monitoring a highway, which was created to welcome both autonomous cars and human driven cars, in a conflicting time between human and automation. Roads were populated by new types of traffic signs: QR codes which were scanned and understood by autonomous cars only and Captcha which were only recognisable by humans in order to resist computer vision dominance.

However, this system of road control, which was letting humans or autonomous cars only understand part of the traffic signs has quickly shown its limit and was dismounted.

Could the inlaying of Captcha and QR code into resistant material such as galvanized steel be a way to conserve and transmit our web imagery to the future generation ?

• Yves Citton - Le démon de la bureaucratisation néolibérale (FR)
• GALLOWAY Alexander - Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (EN)

Printed on a parachute canvas, an emoji - from the whatsapp application - representing an overheated face, seems to be at the mercy of the wind and the heat escaping from the ventilation tube of the building.

Will society find a short term solution to the climate emergency or will the parachute be the last card to play?

This image is one of the 4 visualizations we proposed for the making of physical artistic interventions. The context was an “Art for Architecture” competition for a school in the City of Zurich. The video is now part of the series “Obsology”.

The parachute canvas is a durable and solid material made of heavy-duty plain-woven fabric. Over the years, the material to produce parachute has evolved from canvas to silk or nylar. Nowaday kevlar or terylene, two very strong and heat resistant materials, are mostly use for its fabrication.

At the opposite of this sustainable, resistant material, the emoji, which tend to evolve and make way for new pictograms each year, are ephemeral.

What can emoji tell us about the society we are living in ? Could this installation also serve to leave a trace of our digital age for future generations ?

Carved into a tree trunk, the text “Stop 5G” and the pictogram “Boycott 5G” form a relic of the past that highlights the forgotten tension between technological progress and environmental protection.

In Switzerland, back in 2020, several associations were protesting against the controversial multiplication of 5G antennas led by the country's major telecommunications operators without the consultation of the citizens. Before it became too late, those organizations were warning us about the potential health issues generated by this new intensity of radiation.

A Raspberry Pi and its antenna is attached to a branch of the tree. Is it obsolete or is it still receiving the signal of a 5G network ?

Retrieved from remaining icy landscapes of the arctic, frozen wires, evidence of an ubiquitous and intricate connectivity, indicates a thirst for bandwidth. Safely preserved into ice, those samples extracted from the ground, provide today useful information about the technologies and physical networks which were used back in 2020. The different layers of the ice core depict a vast and complex system of cables that range from the submarine internet cables, optic fiber and also wiring that seems to come from an older time, such as telephone wires. New infrastructures have always been built on top of the previous ones. On the other hand, obsolete networks have never been removed, mostly for economic reasons.

Further explorations showed that data not only transited that way but were also stored in large underground facilities. The storing of digital information into hidden data centres is only one example of such architecture. Biological resources - such as the giant collection of seeds from the global seed vault in Norway - or our human DNA have been retained in the same manner.

• SMEDLEY Tim for BBC – The poisons released by melting arctic ice [EN]
• DEMOS T.J., “Against the Anthropocene : Visual Culture and environment today” [EN]
• BLUM Andrew ,Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet [EN]