Fictitious Future Pasts? Artists reflecting the transhistorical entanglements of telecommunication infrastructures, (post-)colonial trading, and geopolitics

Abstract

This paper discusses the installation Malleable Regress (Arctic) by Dutch artists Femke Herregraven. It argues that, in appropriating objects once serving a now outdated technology to imagine fictitious future technological scrap, Herregraven points to the endless circuits of imagination, innovation, production, distribution, use, obsolescence, disposal, decay and oblivion which drive technological evolution, addressing technology as entangled infrastructure, or, to use Timothy Morton's term, as hyperobject.