Ruins at the technosphere: surviving identities

Abstract

Technological progress and the accumulated material at the technosphere define frontiers through the possibilities of mobility and accessibility to technology. These liminal zones act as filters shaping different centralities and subalternities (or peripheries), inclusions and exclusions, as new forms of coloniality. The matter of the technosphere, betrayed by the linearity of its own progress and for the havoc that nature causes, is discarded and transformed into a new sense of ruin. Art frees it from its futility and transforms it into its material to make visible from its abandonment those borders between the functional and the useless generated by the technological world itself. The artist catalogs and serializes his accumulations; the form-journey becomes the privileged artistic operation for the acquisition of the ruinous material. Art uses the technological object (in ruins) not because of its ephemeral functionality, but rather of the ruinological properties it acquires from its disuse.