A roughly hewn stone, styled like a museum artefact, bears a faint Facebook “f” logo. Beside it a label defines “fossil” scientifically, then cites the modern insult: “He’s a fossil in a digital world.”
Critical Reflection
Archaeology vs. Atavism: At first glance the work reads as an archaeological find, the logo compressed in geological strata. Yet the stone’s presentation also hints at an atavistic loop: perhaps the platform itself drags us backwards toward pre-civilised behaviours. When you scroll comment feeds and posts, what do you see or hear?
- Cave echoes: comment threads resembling torch-lit cave chatter — flickers on a wall, shadows mistaken for truth.
- Pitchfork crowds: the algorithmic amplification of outrage echoes witch-trials and lynch mobs, not enlightened discourse.
- Stone tools / stone tablets: the slab recalls both the earliest human marks and tablets of law. It asks whether social media has become a crude tool or an immutable decree, the current law we live under.
Progress Questioned: The fossilised logo implies a civilisation that once believed it was cutting-edge but is now petrified, laughably primitive. The piece therefore asks: Have we truly evolved, or merely swapped caves for timelines?
“The medium is the massage,” McLuhan warned. Here, the “massage” seems to knead us into pre-rational shapes — tribal, defensive, reactive.
Material Tension
- Stone = slow time → geological patience
- Platform = real-time → frenetic immediacy
Their fusion suggests an arrested development: manic present moment calcifying into permanent artefact.
Context within my practice
This work advances my broader inquiry into excavation metaphors (drilling cores, peeling onion layers) by adding the notion of retrograde motion. Rather than merely unearthing the past, I’m indicting the present as already antiquated – behaviourally Neolithic despite technological gloss.
Future directions
- Series: additional “digital fossils” (TikTok and X)
- Installation: dimly lit “cave” gallery with wall projections of scrolling comment feeds accompanied by guttural echo-loop audio.