Since the beginning of FLUVIALE, Verena Tscherner has been collecting personal items from people attending events and exhibitions. The items handed in by visitors are captured using a 3D scanner, stored in digital memory, and incorporated into the installation as 3D-printed replicas serving as individual “trace elements.” Under the influence of external forces, the objects move around in the breathing time capsule, interfering with each other and inevitably colliding.

The collisions cause the objects to gradually break apart and grind each other down.

An artificially triggered real weathering process has begun and is taking place before the eyes of the visitors. But the erosion process already began with the scanning.

Inaccuracies, disruptive factors, and scaling alter and simplify the information. The personal references and conceptual connections associated with the object have disappeared; even if the personal connection was recorded and stored in a text, or other recording, it is now separated from the object, like the data sets of the 3D images, and can only be artificially reconstructed, i.e., reassembled differently.

They have followed the progress of entropy, the inexorable law of thermodynamics.

Although data transfer serves and should serve to remember and preserve information and knowledge,

the loss of information is already inherent in the transfer of data.

The installation will travel, along the line, with the project and the FLUVIALE, accumulating more and more objects and making the space in the breathing time capsule increasingly cramped.

Just as the transfer of information changes the objects, the development process is predictable, with the objects decomposing beyond recognition and dissolving over time.

Thomas J. Jelinek