Trilobit

Prehistoric relics and contemporary technologies unearth a world where human concepts of time are dissolved. The exhibition space is divided into two zones: the first one houses an active seismograph, the results of its measurements, and three dioramas from the series Atmosphere ≠ Totality; the second contains a mystical, capsule-like object guarded by two trilobite fossils. The metal construction of the seismograph holds a scroll of carbon black paper, on which the vibrations measured in the space are etched. While the fossils are witnesses of a time long past, the real-time measurements of the seismograph render the current dynamics visible. Trilobites were arthropods with exoskeletons that disappeared from the ocean floor during the great Permian-Triassic mass extinction 252 million years ago. Their enigmatic anatomy, which has often served as inspiration for extraterrestrial life in pop culture, makes their past existence seem just as alien as the distant future. In his philosophy of speculative materialism, Quentin Meillassoux coined the term archefossil for this phenomenon: The mere existence of fossilized creatures points to a time when there were no humans who could have perceived and thereby shaped the world. Such an ancestral reality implies the existence of a pre-human world that generates meaning independently of anthropocentric observations, outside the realm of human perception.