[UN]INTENDED CONSEQUENCES

STATEMENT OF INTENT

Inspired by the concept of future archaeology, [Un]Intended Consequences imagines how our now - the Anthropocene - will be imagined by those who come after. It was made by keeping our last people in mind; holding compassion for them throughout the process.

It posits a world peppered with the remnants of the buildings and machines responsible for an end point of the climate crisis, and imagines a future people trying to peer into our now and understand why we did what we did.

This first chapter focuses on the oil industry, not least because of the conflict I feel from the benefit I have gained as a result of it. My childhood Highland home was part of the 70s oil boom in Scotland; my father’s livelihood was dependent on it, and oil was what put food on our table. My home for the last 20 plus years on the Firth of Forth is peppered with refineries and pipelines, tankers and rigs; it still fuels the local economy, even as it fades into the background of the energy economy in Scotland.

So it made sense that these two places, both profoundly affected by the oil industry, should be the focal points for this first chapter of the work.

Driven entirely by archaeological thinking, the work attempts to break the process of “stacking” (a process generally used to create incredibly sharp and noise free images), treating the digital layers the process utilises as analogous to the layers of earth in an archaeological dig. I deliberately induce errors in the digital files produced by misaligning these layers until a profound glitchiness dominates the image; until detail is all but obscured.

These errors reference the biases and other unreliabilities in all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves; whether that be about the past or that we transmit into the future.

This leads to images that speak to the archaeological process. They invite a fuzzy interpretation of the evidence that mimics elements of archaeological interpretation itself, echoing the imagination of our potential descendants.

This work is part of a wider effort to see archaeology and heritage as “future-assemblers”; an attempt to help us see our world through our descendant’s eyes and be empathetic for them as we do so. It is an effort, in a small way, to reframe our thinking.