David Aston

ARTWORK DETAILS

David Aston
Pergamon I
iPhone 5, glass, ceramic, gravel, soil, moss, plants, time
2017
58.5 H x 42.5 W x 29.5 D cm

FURTHER DETAILS

Each culture leaves its remnants. The stone, metal and ceramic artefacts which allow historians to interpret the people that created them and the beliefs, aesthetics and values they lived by.

The series is named after the Ancient Greek city of Pergamon which held one of the most important libraries of the ancient world. The Pergamon Altar now resides in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, where the series was conceived.

As our world has become increasingly digitised, much of contemporary culture is virtual, distributed as data files in hand-held tablets. Pergamon I is a living act of digital archeology. It asks how our collective culture will be curated and preserved. Whether our tablets, corroded by time and soil, will be readable or open to reinterpretation by future civilisations? Or, whether they will be rendered tabula rasa (blank slates), and through our shift to a fully virtual world, we are inadvertently walking into a digital dark age?

Pergamon I was created on the 11 March 2017 and is photographed every three months to record the decay and plant growth.

EXHIBITIONS

2018 - Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition
Pergamon I was personally selected by Grayson Perry and exhibited in gallery VIII. Gallery VIII was hung by Cornelia Parker and Grayson Perry. https://se.royalacademy.org.uk/2018/galleries/gallery-viii

2018 - Other Art Fair, London