David McDougall

seed_ tomb_time capsule is a large acrylic, tear-drop shaped structure.  The acrylic form is filled with expanded foam logs cast from a dead ash tree found along the Ottawa river.   The work touches on the concepts of technology, the environment and extinction.

 Through image, scale and materiality the work experiments with the three concepts of the seed, time capsule and tomb, juxtaposing their interconnections and differences.  A seed stores future genetic information, it is the engine of living systems.  A tomb one the other hand is a monument to what we’ve lost.   A time capsule is a perverse mixture of these two concepts; buried in the ground traveling into the future at the rate of one second per second and often lost to history entirely, the time capsule promises to communicate and preserve culture for future generations.  It is however culture itself, and the social technologies we create that is the wellspring of our legacies.  we too often confuse the time capsule with the seed, and thus promulgate our societal and ecological values from a standpoint of technological hubris rather then from meaningful policies of preservation and growth.