Future Fossils

Digging is a violent act of modernity. For most of human history, digging wasn’t nearly this destructive, but the amount of digging done in the past 200 years is probably more than humans did in the past 2000 years prior to that. When we dig, we find fossils. (And fossil fuels.) We keep dredging up deep time.

Fossils require the digger—a conscious being that can has a notion of vast pasts and futures. Fossils have more to do with us than they have to do with the material quality of a rock with an impression. The timestamp is only relevant because we process time linearly.

Guest and artist Priscilla Fusco chats with us fossil time, and the legitimacy of various substrates as “fossils.” Can sound be fossilized? Does plastic waste count as a fossilized living thing? Can we manufacture fossils?