Feeding the machine, or the sedimentation of our digital habits

This totem is made of worn-out computer parts, irreparable, condemned to become waste. Assembled vertically, they become a column of memory: the material archaeology of a digital world we believe to be immaterial.

Every fan, every circuit once helped produce connection, images, human exchange. Today, these technical organs are silent, immobilized, transformed into relics of progress.

The addition of white milk bottles introduces a tension: the black, opaque machine meets white matter nourishing and vital.

Between pollution and birth, ending and beginning again, the totem oscillates: is it a funerary monument to progress… or an attempt at rebirth?

I work with what remains. With what is no longer repaired. With what progress leaves

behind.

The machines that connect us end up alone, silent, unplugged.They carried our messages, our images, our memories, our bonds.Then they become invisible, useless, replaceable.

I refuse this disappearance.I stack these fragments of technology the way one raises a stele.A column of memory for a world that claims to be immaterial. The internet is not in the clouds: it is heavy, mineral, ventilated, dusty.

This totem is a body without skin. A skeleton of the present. A fossil of the future.

Into this black, opaque, industrial matter, I introduce the white of milk bottles. A domestic white, everyday, familiar.A white that evokes birth, growth, care, transmission.

These bottles no longer hold anything, but they still speak of nourishment. They seem to want to feed the technological column the way one would feed an exhausted organism. As if the machine, having reached the end of its cycle, needed a vital gesture simple, human.

Black and white confront each other. Waste and the living coexist. The end and the origin overlap.

I don't know whether this monument is funerary or fertile. I only know that it refuses to be forgotten.

Nothing is truly obsolete as long as we choose to look at it differently.

Anmarie Leon.

Beacons: https://beacons.ai/anmarieleon