Discrete Model 021

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, 100 Parliament Street

This collage is from the series 'Discrete Model', which the artist Goshka Macuga started in 2018, exploring the history of humankind, technological advancement and a posthuman future. In the series, Macuga works with found imagery, which appears as if woven behind a graph-paper grid – a reference to British mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage's use of Jacquard weaving looms in the development of the Analytical Engine, a mechanical calculating machine. 

Macuga’s 'Discrete Model 021' foregrounds the entwinement between technological advancement and today’s environmental crisis, namely the way notions of progress and development have often sacrificed the earth. The work features photographs of a motorway, a concrete city and factory chimneys pumping out smoke against a backdrop of transmission towers, all shot from an aerial perspective, itself a technology developed for warfare. The images are stacked in an order of expanding width, calling to mind a skyscraper, and surrounded by an empty abyss of graph-paper, which threatens their annihilation. 

Places

Subjects

computing, weaving (as Subject), technology, analytical engine, jacquard weaving loom, computer programming

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), collage, photo-collage, paper collage, woven

Artist

Goshka Macuga (1967 - )

Title

Discrete Model 021

Date

2019

Medium

collage

Dimensions

height: 90.6 cm; width: 66.1 cm; depth: 3.9 cm

Acquisition

Gift of the artist via the Outset/Government Art Collection Fund, with additional funds provided by the Government Art Collection, December 2020

GAC number

18877