If Archaeologists Uncovered Today’s Society, It Might Look Like This

If archaeological excavators in 2450 uncovered today’s society, petrified in time, what would it look like? Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

If archaeological excavators in 2450 uncovered today’s society, petrified in time, what would it look like?

Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

Artist and one-half of quirky design duo Snarkitecture Daniel Arsham teases out an answer to that question in his new exhibit, Welcome to the Future. Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

Artist and one-half of quirky design duo Snarkitecture Daniel Arsham teases out an answer to that question in his new exhibit, Welcome to the Future.

Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

In a circular hole in a Miami gallery, Arsham has stacked ash and crystal casts of modern consumer goods. Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

In a circular hole in a Miami gallery, Arsham has stacked ash and crystal casts of modern consumer goods.

Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

There's a little bit of everything: guitars, boom boxes, film reels, telephones, toys, and more. Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

There's a little bit of everything: guitars, boom boxes, film reels, telephones, toys, and more.

Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

When Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered Pompeii with volcanic ash, it preserved an Italian city as it existed during the era of Pax Romana. Centuries later, excavators found, among other things, dried summer fruits in the markets, sealed jars of preserves, and painted frescoes. It makes you wonder: If excavators in 2450 uncovered today’s society, petrified in time, what would it look like?

Daniel Arsham’s latest work, Welcome to the Future, teases that out.

Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Arsham

A few years ago Arsham, an artist and half of the quirky design duo Snarkitecture, visited Easter Island to work on a travel book for Louis Vuitton. Archaeologists were digging on the island at the time and found a surreal scene: artifacts from another archaeological dig that occurred almost a century ago. “It was a collapse in time,” Arsham says. “I was thinking about this notion of time, and the evolution of technology, and how I could create a collapsing of time.”

Arsham started casting modern consumer products in materials like ash or crystal, surfing eBay for hours at time to find Pentax cameras, music players, and other ephemera. Last year he even collaborated with Pharrell to create an eroded ash ’80s-era Casio keyboard. Arsham’s exhibited these sculptures as one-offs; for Welcome to the Future, thousands of objects will be scattered across the floor in a 25-foot hole he dug in Miami gallery Locusts Space, for Art Basel Miami Beach.

“It’s a huge mix of everything from contemporary culture,” he says. “Everything from a guitar to basketballs to many types of cameras, keyboards, to an American flag.”

Arsham’s range of materials—ash, steel, obsidian, rock dust, and crystal—span from black to white, with shades of gray in between, so he’s arranged the objects in an ombre pattern that calls to mind the seeping ash that froze Pompeii in time so many centuries ago. “When crystallization happens, things align in a certain way,” he says. “And [the gradient] gives the appearance that there’s a charring or burning towards the side.”

Check out more of WIRED’s picks for Art Basel here.