Bus Projects, May 2018
“Proposed was a model for maps in real-time and real-space: non-stop geographies. Growth machines, electric fields. Machine visions underpinning fenestration patterns. An architecture of maps. It never had legs.
Maps that monitor, that manifest growth and decay. Growth as decay. Those few cities left could seem like derelict circuit boards, pulled from machines, ejected during some event or another, with their host discarded and these few components and connections then left to live on in new and unintended circumstances. Future upgrades functioned better as future ruins.
And with all power shut down, no incidental heat resulted to drive away moisture. Disassembled, deconstructed circuitry and crystal defects. Where there was moisture and voltage around, inevitable contaminants conjured a battery. Dissimilar metals in the company of electrolytes formed them. Currents leaked causing corrosion and failure. Inductive noise coupling was never far behind.
We were wrong however to think things had stopped. We simply stopped seeing it. Components still insulated, propagated, replicated; substrates as semiconductors or insulators. Dendrites meant corrosion. Dust, rust, fog, flood. The airflow soon clogged and the machine overheated at power-up.
The voltage buckles and hisses after the event has long gone, committed to re-connecting components, desperate to make a whole again. The imperative is always to remake the machine or make a new machine. We stop and there is no panic. And then we look again with the thing as it unfolds in the circumstances of the world, no longer looking behind it for originating intentions. Haunted circuits, accidental batteries, dislocated like ruins or robot body parts: resistors, transmitters, potentiometers, inductors, oscillators. Febrile with fevered electricity. Ghosts of things and the persistence of ideas. Entropic not stopped. “
Dr. Julian Harris, April 2018
Photography by Christo Crocker