Fictitious Narratives
A concrete Anglepoise lamp, designed by Robin Tarbet for Robot Bin Things (image: courtesy of Robin Tarbet).
“Researchers detail the most ancient bat fossil ever discovered,” reads the first of 1,020,000 headlines that appear when I search for “fossil” on Google’s news tab. It was posted two days ago. “Dinosaurs lived in the arctic research suggests” (one week ago); “Giant rhino fossils in China show new species was taller than giraffe!” (two weeks ago); “ninety-nine-million-year-old snail fossilized in amber while giving birth” (one month ago). The list goes on and on. Fossils are being discovered all the time.
A fossil offers a snapshot of the elusive former lives that our planet and its creatures have lived. Each time a fossil is uncovered, our understanding of the world shifts subtly. They let us glimpse the past, tell stories, and imagine a world that is radically different and yet, in some ways, surprisingly similar to that we know now. Scrolling through Google and its strata of data, it struck me that the headlines almost exclusively relate to animals. But when the time comes (provided that the Earth is still intact), 10,000, 100,000 or even 1m years from now, what will our fossils show? What stories will we leave behind for future generations to uncover in the human-inhabited layer of the Earth’s shell? Will our descendants even be able find our fossilised bodies amidst the detritus that our society – obsessed with extraction, production and consumption – has left behind?
These are some of the questions that I have noticed a small but growing number of designers and artists starting to ponder. These practitioners are turning their backs on the more predictable archetypes of design (note: endless chairs and lamps) and instead focusing their attention on fossils. More specifically, they have focused on “technofossils”, those material footprints that humans will leave behind through manufactured goods. These technofossils will last almost indefinitely and their accumulation is now creating a new geological layer in the Earth’s crust, something the geologist and engineer Peter K. Haff named the “technosphere” in 2014.
Abhurite from Louise Silfversparre’s Technofossils project (image: courtesy of Louise Silfversparre).
At first glance, fossils seem an unlikely subject matter of, or medium for, design. Traditionally, they are not designed at all, but instead occur naturally and accidentally across timespans far beyond our reach. So why is the subject now being extracted by designers and brought to the top of the discipline’s crusty surface? The reasons, like the subject, are multi-layered and entangled in science, storytelling, curiosity, aesthetic intrigue, and fear. Let’s go on a little dig together.
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Early projects centred around design and fossils began to appear in the 2010s, running almost in parallel with a growing scientific focus on Earth science, deep future time and humans’ long-term impact on the planet. In 2012, Yesenia Thibault-Picazo, a designer and sound artist, began Craft in the Anthropocene, an ongoing project that investigates what the future of geology may look like. Thibault-Picazo’s work has multiple outcomes, but all are premised on the question of what our descendants will find when they dig down in thousands of years. Could our waste become their resources? Our technofossils, their fossil fuels? One outcome, for instance, is an imagined future rock that will be found in sites across the north of the UK – Cumbrian Bone Marble. Although speculative, the material is not mere fanciful fiction and is instead based on scientific research and conversations with Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist and the leader of the Anthropocene Working Group [AWG] — a group of geologists, biologists, atmospheric chemists, polar and marine scientists, archaeologists and Earth scientists. In 2009, this group was tasked by the International Commission on Stratigraphy to gather evidence of whether humans are changing the surface of our planet.
The outcomes of the AWG’s research are intended to determine whether the Earth has moved into the Anthropocene – an unofficial but widely used unit of geological time – or if we remain in the Holocene, which began approximately 11,700 years ago. Derived from the Greek words “anthropo”, for “man”, and “cene” for “new”, the Anthropocene posits a radical reshaping of the Earth’s geology around human activity, but needs to be backed up by evidence of human-made changes to the Earth before it can be formalised as a new epoch. Since geological units of time are measured by Earth’s rock layers and the fossils found within them, the AWG is, in essence, looking for technofossils. They have been searching for “the potential for synthetic materials, from artificial radionuclides produced by nuclear testing to plastic waste, to leave an identifiable signal in the strata,” writes David Farrier in his book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils.
This scientific search seems to have played into design’s penchant for technofossils. Without it, there would be no subject matter to explore. Indeed, it was only when Zalasiewicz told Thibault-Picazo about the potential geological implications of foot and mouth disease, which devastated the UK’s livestock and agricultural industries in 2001, that she began her project. During this epidemic, farmers were forced to slaughter millions of sheep and cattle to eradicate the illness. Before the animals were buried in pits, however, they were partially burnt to remove the virus and sanitise the bodies. “The physical phenomenon of this burning was a pre-fossilisation which helped the bone material to transform and, basically, undergo the process of fossilisation,” explains Thibault-Picazo. As a result, “this pile of bones could become a marble in the medium future”. She believes that future humans could mine this material and has created a series of material samples and objects, such as a pestle and mortar made from layers of cow bones and synthetic marble, which are cast into blocks and then worked into real stone. The process for making her Cumbrian Bone Marble mimics the geological process that the actual livestock bones will be exposed to, thereby creating an artificially accelerated fossilisation.
Cumbrian Bone Marble, created by Yesenia Thibault-Picazo (image: courtesy of Yesenia Thibault-Picazo).
Thibault-Picazo describes the subject of her bone marbles as “a little bit gross and quite grim”, but the project may nevertheless possess a sense of optimism – our waste may become our great-great-great-greatgreat-great-great-great-grandchildren’s treasure. Given time, it will no longer be rubbish, but rather a resource ready to be extracted. This may seem reassuring, but it is also a dangerous idea. Max Norman, for instance, writing in the November 2020 edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books, suggests that “visualizing future fossils helps us with the private task of coping with the underlying truth of which ecological consciousness is only the latest manifestation: we live in a fragile, contingent world, and everything that we care about will one day disappear. Geological thinking is the Stoicism of the Anthropocene, a resource for learning how to die in the world we have made for ourselves.” Could deep-time design, then, be a form of escapism? By reframing activities that produce vast amounts of waste and cause huge ecological damage as prospective sources of future resources, is our guilt absolved?
Yet Thibault-Picazo’s speculative fossilisations frequently feel terrifying, not mollifying. “Climate scientists at the Australian National University recently proposed that human activity is forcing changes to the Earth system 170 times faster than natural processes,” writes Farrier. “By this queasy calculus, we will see ten thousand years of environmental change in fifty-eight years, less than a single lifetime.” This statistic does not bring a sense of what-will-be-will-be, but should instead compel us to change, with Farrier stressing that we must show a “willingness to turn and face the damage we have done”. The fact that designers such as Thibault-Picazo are dealing with these “gross” and “grim” topics is perhaps an indicator that we are beginning to do so. Indeed, Thibault-Picazo says that when she first started the project around 10 years ago, many people were largely ignorant about the impact humans are having on the planet. “I remember having discussions with people and it was a discovery for them,” she says. “I think now there is more of an awareness.”
While Thibault-Picazo’s project is based on manufacturing speculative future fossils, other designers have begun working on collecting, categorising and displaying existing examples of technofossils. These designers are grappling with changes that are already in motion – their subject matter is future fossils that will persist for millions of years, but which already exist in the here and now. They are shocking scars tucked into the nooks and crannies of our landscapes.
When artist Kelly Jazvac attended a talk by the oceanographer Charles Moore in 2012, he mentioned a strange stone that he had come across in 2006 off the coast of Hawaii. Intrigued, she and Patricia Corcoran, an Earth scientist, travelled to Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, in 2013. Here they began a research project based on this new “stone”, for which they coined the name “plastiglomerate”. Plastiglomerates often look like naturally occurring stones, but when you get up close you begin to see that they contain segments of rope and foreign objects, or splashes of bright, artificial colour. As their name suggests, they are not natural. The 200-plus plastiglomerate samples collected by Jazvac and Corcoran are pieces of plastic debris that have been burned in bonfires and fused with sand, pebbles, shells, basalt, wood and rocks. In their 2014 research paper ‘An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record’, co-authored with Moore, they state: “Our study presents the first rock type composed partially of plastic material that has strong potential to act as a global marker horizon in the Anthropocene.” Jazvac was not only inspired by the work being done by scientists, but has also actively contributed to it. Plastiglomerates are both evidence of, and a symbol for, how we are visibly changing the composition of the Earth’s crust. We are literally manufacturing the Anthropocene through the 367m metric tonnes of plastic that the world is estimated to produce each year. Plastiglomerates are fossils of the future but also of the present: nature infused with the human-made, or, the human-made infused with nature.
A plastiglomerate, found by Patricia Corcoran, Charles Moore, and Kelly Jazvac (image: Jeff Elstone).
Jazvac and Corcoran documented plastiglomerates through a series of photographs by Jeff Elstone, in which each sample sits against a white background so as to foreground the way in which its constituent materials are sometimes discreetly meshed, at other times jarringly mashed together. The pair have gone on to exhibit their “stones” in galleries around the world, with plastiglomerates having been displayed or collected by the Yale Peabody Museum, Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut, and Amsterdam’s Natura Artis Magistra, among others. Perhaps because of the plastiglomerates’ strange beauty, or their ability to talk about destruction, the project received widespread coverage, from mainstream titles such as The New York Times, e-flux and Hyperallergic, as well as specialist scientific journals. As a project, it has bridged the gap between anthropogenic research and public understanding. Speaking to The New York Times in 2014, Corcoran said, “I’m sure people have seen plastiglomerates in other places and just haven’t reported them or given them a name.”
Since their initial documentation in Hawaii, plastiglomerates have been found on almost every shore, from Cornwall to Sydney, from Portugal to Canada – they are far more common than originally imagined. It seems likely that the artistic representation of these readymade sculptures contributed to the burgeoning research surrounding plastiglomerates, and has encouraged other scientists and members of the public to document samples in their local areas. The project shows how designers and artists can use their material knowledge and visual storytelling to present complex ideas in a simple, engaging manner, helping to make abstract concepts such as geological time, which are often shrouded by scientific jargon, understandable. Designers and artists can serve as communicators of how we are changing our planet – deep-time messengers. Zalasiewicz tells me that this is important, because “scientists are, in general, not very skilled at expressing ideas to the wider public.” They can, he explains, “become terribly specialised” and speak in ways that only other scientist in the same field can understand. “New collaborations [between scientists and creative practitioners] are beginning to bring research out into the open and are forcing us [scientists] to construct a narrative that will be widely understandable.” To demonstrate how the science of the Anthropocene has become more mainstream, he recounts a story a colleague told him. When this colleague googled the word “anthropocene” in 2010/11, roughly 10 years after the word was popularised by biologist Eugene Stormer and chemist Paul Crutzen, he got 50-60 hits – an afternoon’s worth of reading could give you all the world’s digitally published information on the topic. Today, however, Googling “anthropocene” brings up 5-6bn hits and reaches well beyond science. Of course, the content on the internet has drastically grown in this period and some expansion was to be expected, but this drastic increase does serve as evidence of how the term is now commonly used beyond the realms of science by people working in literature, law, politics, public health, social history, design and more.
As wider engagement around this subject grows, the AWG has compiled a significant amount of evidence linking human activity to the changing nature of the world’s crust. This research culminated in 2016, when, at the International Geological Congress in South Africa, the group voted “by large majority” that “the Anthropocene possesses geological reality”. In other words, there is enough evidence of lasting, human-made technofossils to mark as geological change.They posit that the Anthropocene began in the 1950s with the emergence nuclear-bomb tests, which spread their radioactive particles across the planet. This conclusion was further formalised in 2019 when the AWG completed a binding vote to affirm two key questions: 1) “Should the Anthropocene be treated as a formal chrono-stratigraphic unit?”; and 2) “Should the primary guide for the base of the Anthropocene be one of the stratigraphic signals around the mid-twentieth century of the Common Era?” Both questions received 88 per cent votes in favour. At some point during this period of rigorous scientific investigation and understanding, I suspect that many designers may have experienced an “Oh fuck...” moment. This new layer of the earth’s surface, built up from toxic material traces that can be found from the bottom of the oceans to the outer edges of our atmosphere, has been fed by design and industry – a geological accretion of what Farrier characterised as “technological innovation” and “material consumption”.
Experiments in Cumbrian Bone Marble (image: courtesy of Yesenia Thibault-Picazo).
The most sensible thing to do in response to these findings might have been to do nothing: to stop in our consumption-driven tracks and acknowledge that we don’t necessarily need more design. It is an uncomfortable idea for designers – what do you do when you know that you should no longer make? When you are petrified? While designers are still pondering this question, the scientific investigations have not stopped. Despite its affirmative second vote, the AWG continues to work towards fully formalising the Anthropocene as a new layer of geological time and is conducting further research. Kirsty Robertson, an associate professor of contemporary art at Western University, Canada, whose curatorial, writing and artistic practices focus on petrochemicals and plastics, points out that the “hubris behind self-naming an era is inescapable”, and that there is more at stake than simply naming a moment in deep time – it is also about understanding our relationship to the planet. Writing for e-flux journal in 2016, Robertson issued a warning that “the way that the Anthropocene tends to be used as always-already underway highlights a distinction, and by proxy a hierarchy, between humans and nonhumans (or “more-than-humans”) that perpetuates a nature-culture divide and suppresses ways of understanding the world that might be more relational than taxonomic.” With this warning in mind, we can also use the Anthropocene as a means of understanding the impact we are having and how to minimise it.
The appeal of technofossils as a subject matter for designers seems to be their ability to thrust us into an uncomfortable story that confronts us with our relationship with the planet. They tangibly link our present reality to our future traces, and serve as a crystal ball that shows us what we may leave behind. Louise Silfversparre, for instance, is a 3D designer and animator, who hopes that her Technofossils project (2020) may be able “to give people a deeper insight into how the habits of our civilisation and the way we live have direct consequences on the nature that surrounds us”. Silfversparre’s series of 3D-rendered animations tell the stories of six minerals that would not exist without human activity, and is inspired by the 2017 scientific paper ‘On the Mineralogy of the “Anthropocene Epoch”’, which catalogues 208 humanmade minerals. Take Trinitite, for example. In a 1m20s video, Silfversparre presents an electric-green nugget, whose perforated, jagged body gently floats and bounces. It sheds small flecks of itself like dandruff, which drift across a rusty desert-like backdrop that is accompanied by a caption which reads: “On July 16, 1945, when the United States Government conducted the first successful nuclear bomb test in the desert outside of New Mexico[...] [the] desert sand melted under the incredible heat, creating a radioactive, green-colored glass that today is called Trinitite. This is the only known event where the mineral Trinitite has been created.”
The technofossils Silfversparre presents seem somewhat fictional, like kryptonite, with her use of digital technology enhancing this sense of the uncanny. “I was conscious that 3D and animation can easily end up being perceived as just beautiful visuals and nothing more,” she says. “Does that mean that I’m beautifying a problem through my aesthetic choices? Will the audience focus more on the visuals than the subject? There’s always a risk of that, but I hope to draw the visitor in through the animations, get them to stop, and become involved through the information and the meaning behind it.” While the video draws you in, it is the caption that delivers the story and the punch. The digital nature of the project also lets Silfversparre speak about technofossils that have had “hardly any previous documentation”, and show them in their natural habitats, rather than removed from context in a gallery.
Trinitite, shown as part of Silfversparre’s Technofossils project (image: courtesy of Louise Silfversparre).
Outside of the world of galleries, however, are other projects dealing with technofossils. On social media, the @Technofossils Instagram account was launched by an anonymous author in January 2020, and posts photographs of moments where objects and nature intersect – a marble gravestone being enveloped by a tree trunk; a Nokia 5510 from 1998 cemented into a wall; the negative, fossil-like trace of a keyboard embedded in a dodgy pavement repair. It playfully investigates our future fossils through the networked grid combined with everyday observations. In academia too, the subject is receiving increasingly rigorous investigation. Alice Twemlow’s Design and the Deep Future programme at the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague (KABK),[1] encourages staff and students to engage with ecology, design and geological time through symposia, exhibitions, events, research projects and lectures. Twemlow, an educator and design critic, writes in her essay of the same name that she began this programme because, “[we] need to pay more attention to what happens when a designed entity becomes trash, of the social behaviours, politics, infrastructures, mechanisms, and economies that shape and gather around its disposal.” She believes that this, in turn, may “enrich our understanding of design culture” and could also “help provide a muchneeded critique of the kind of labels used a lot today that mislead with their deflection of attention away from the physicality of waste, such as the supposed immateriality of information, the ‘cloud’, service design, ‘innovation culture’, and the ‘creative economy’.” Twemlow stresses the need for designers to look beyond design and into other disciplines such as archaeology and discard studies, “to allow for investigation into the kinds of topics that orbit time and design, topics such as waste and trash, the dematerialization of design, repair and re-use, digital detritus, and speculative design.” It is an idea also supported by Zalasiewicz. “If designers have this long-term perspective in mind,” he says, “that might help to create objects that cause less damage in the process of fossilisation.” The end-of-life of objects, he adds, is an indispensable topic for design education.
Another educational initiative around deep time is A Museum for Future Fossils, a workshop and graduate summer school in Canada/USA, which launched in overarching question that the course sought to explore was: “What does it mean to think curatorially about human impact on the environment?” This institutional engagement with technofossils seems to be building momentum – the more work that is made, the more the interest grows, the more work is made. Deep time may soon be, if it is not already, zeitgeist.
Something & Son, a design studio run by Andy Merritt and Paul Smyth, is also seeking to understand how to engage the public with thinking about humans’ impact on the environment in the context of geological timescales. Merritt and Smyth have spent the past seven years working on Future Fossil, a sculpture-cum-bandstand commissioned by Milton Keynes Council as a permanent artwork for the town’s Oxley Park. It is intended to open in 2022 and speaks to questions of permanence and impermanence. Milton Keynes was designed in the 1960s as part of the UK government’s plans to create a generation of new towns in southeast England, hoping to relieve housing congestion in London. The UK Office of National Statistics indicates that around 270,000 people now live there. Future Fossil reflects upon the speed at which Milton Keynes has grown, contrasting this with the longevity of the fossils that have been discovered there. Although Milton Keynes is now inland, it is estimated that around 167m years ago the site was under a shallow tropical sea, dotted with tiny islands. Today, tiny fragments of prehistoric marine and land organisms, including brachiopods, oysters and other bivalve molluscs, can be found in the limestone on which the town was built.
A CAD image depicting Something & Son’s planned Future Fossil sculpture (image: courtesy of Something & Son).
Standing more than 8m high, Future Fossil resembles a cave, but it is formed from the inverted negative of a house’s facade – to create it, a mould designed to resemble the newly built residences that surround Oxley Park will be filled with “the materials of our time”, says Merritt. The structure, he says, will be a highly engineered cocktail of steel, eco-cement, plastic, metal, old logs, and even fruit and vegetables, which has been designed to be structurally sound. “My preference was that we burnt the mould away to leave the chasm,” says Merrit, who explains that this idea was abandoned due to the damage it would do to the materials, as well as the environmental impact of burning. Instead they are working on other de-moulding methods. With time, the natural components of the sculpture will rot, leaving nooks and crannies for nature to grow in, while the humanmade materials will persist. This strange concoction of building materials points to the messiness of our future strata, which, after years of compression underground, will contain a puzzling collection of materials that have been extracted from and travelled across the world – an exotic cake with ingredients that would never naturally be found together. Not everything will survive as a perfect impression of a house or product. In fact, most things will meld together, crushed under the weight of geological time and pressure to become a new layer in the Earth’s crust. Each future fossil is dependent on its context and conditions. Standing inside the Future Fossil, one might wonder if this is what the world will be like in 10,000 years or more. What will we leave behind once we are gone? How do we understand what we design? And how might these designed objects persist?
It is not only down to design, however. In his book The Earth After Us, Zalasiewicz asks the reader, “What fossils did you make today?” Zalasiewicz explains that it is not just living bodies that become fossils, but also many of the things we do. Traces of activity have the potential to become “ichnofossils” or “trace fossils”, which can similarly be discovered down the line and tell stories about us. “Humans have the capacity to make fossils all the time,” writes Zalasiewicz, “each time, for example, that one defecates, or walks through the park.” His reframing of unremarkable everyday activities encourages a certain self-consciousness about our individual behaviour, inviting us to look at the world around us through deep-time-tinted glasses. One trace that we will leave behind in abundant quanitites is packaging. Robot Bin Things by Robin Tarbet, for instance, is a series of whimsical sculptures that resemble a little army of robots. Upon inspection, they reveal themselves to be concrete castings taken from the packaging of tech products – garbage that has been fossilised. Tarbet creates his fossils based on packaging that appeals to him and which, he believes, might look good when cast. This aesthetic pull of the fossil form, however, as well as the nature of the subject matter, pose a dilemma to all designers working in the field. “There is a constant awareness of using up resources and an acknowledgement of overconsumption,” explains Tarbet. “[But] in a very disposable era, I like the idea of making a work that, like a fossil, could outlast me due to my material choices alone. Found out of context, [a work like this] could potentially pose a question of how they came to exist, as an art anomaly with the characteristics but none of the intended functions of the consumer products it originates from.”
And so we come to another explanation for designers’ interest in fossils – the lure of the intentional trace. By studying what will survive intact and what will be crushed in particular conditions, we can to some extent engineer things and, by extension, ourselves, to remain forever on the planet – a horcrux of fossilised eternal life. What does it mean to self-consciously make things that will persist? In the introduction to his book, Zalasiewicz writes, half-jokingly: “If you desire immortality for some aspect of your own personal sojourn on Earth, then these pages might contain some more or less soundly based practical advice on how you might increase your chances of carrying a final message, that of your own brief existence, into the next geological era. If you wish, then, to adorn some museum of the far future, read on.” Designing for an audience of the future is an intriguing proposition. On the one hand, you could imagine Elon Musk or Richard Branson cottoning onto the fact they could memorialise themselves in fossil form. Rather than their current space race, they could instead invest billions in the fossil race – the slowest and, possibly, most pointless competition on Earth. On a less egotistical note, we could ask questions around how we might design for humans many generations away – those whose world, language and cultural references will be drastically different from our own. What will they need to know and why, and could fossils be used to show some of the things the Earth has lost? Garden Fossils (2014), for instance, is a speculative botanical archive of fossilised flowers that will likely no longer populate our planet in the future due to climate change. Made by Ella Bulley, a London-based material designer, the archive documents two examples of endangered plants: English bluebells and cherry blossoms. The first is on the UK endangered species list, while the latter is blooming earlier and earlier due to climate change, causing concern around its ability to reproduce if exposed to sudden frosts.
Bluebell fossils created by Ella Bulley for her Garden Fossils project (image: courtesy of Ella Bulley).
Bulley collected damaged specimens of the plants and encased each of them in a bioresin of her own recipe, mimicking the petrification process that sees objects trapped in tree resin transformed into fossilised amber with the organism preserved inside with pressure over time. “At the time [of making], there were a lot of projects about ‘The world’s ending because of climate change, do something now!’ or ‘This is what the world will be like in a post-apocalyptic future!’” says Bulley. These kinds of projects can become alarming and disempowering in their scope, but Bulley’s archive offers a specific, tangible story about loss. “Rather than having stories or images or texts about these flowers that once were, I wondered if there is a way to preserve for future generations,” she says, with her project asking if we can manipulate historical documentation, and create homemade histories to counter the wider societal carelessness that is changing the course of nature’s history. But Garden Fossils also speaks to a current audience, challenging them to consider if we can preserve species by slowing down the climatic dangers they are exposed to as a result of our behaviour.
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I search around my room for inspiration on how to conclude this essay and am confronted by the silent stillness of all the future fossils that I have accumulated in my life. Typing these words, I am acutely aware of the materials in my laptop – the plastic keys clicking, the aluminium casing heating up under the strain of all these words, and its extraordinarily efficient interior, a charcuterie plate of rare metals pulled up from the depths of the Earth. And suddenly, I too am petrified. A petrified design writer, writing about petrification and petrified designers. I suppose the technofossils have done their job. Design’s growing interest in this field is intrinsically linked to the environmental crisis. It provokes us to reflect on our culpability – technofossils are, after all, designed things. They invite us to look further ahead than we are accustomed to doing and gaze with more clarity into deep time – to bridge the gap between now and then. One can only hope that this budding interest in technofossils will help trigger a shift in how and what we design and consume. As to where this path of designers and technofossils will lead us, only time will tell.
1 A platform I worked on as a research assistant, which sparked my interest in geological time and its entanglement with design.
Words Lara Chapman
This article was originally published in Disegno #33. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.