ARTWORK DETAILS
David Aston
Pergamon II
MacBook Air, glass, soil, moss, seeds, time
24 H x 21 W x 1.25 in
4 August 2018
“Pergamon 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?”
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 Ancient Greek city of Pergamon once held one of the most important libraries of the ancient world. the library is long lost but its stone Altar now resides in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
As our world has become increasingly digitised, much of contemporary culture is virtual, distributed as data files in hand-held tablets. Pergamon II 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 II was created on the 3 June 2018 and is regularly photographed to record the passing of time, decay and plant growth.
AESTHETICA ART PRIZE
Animation for The Aesthetica Art Prize
EXHIBITONS
2021 - Kühlhaus, Berlin
BBA Gallery Art Prize
TALKS & EDUCATION
2024 | UCL East | Knowledge exchange lab
Earthly Values - Art, Research and Co-Existence with UCL East