Future Fossils: contemporary technological artifacts cast in concrete

The Bughouse Future Fossils series are a set of highly detailed, weathered concrete castings of near-contemporary technology, from DJ turntables to film cameras to Atari joysticks. They're a nice memento mori -- a weighty-but-whimsical reminder of our own technosphere's doomed frailty.

bughouse :: Future Fossils (via DVICE)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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phisrow

I like them as sculptural pieces. The one thing, though, that strikes me as missing as ‘fossils’ is that virtually nothing fossilizes like that:

Things fossilize in ways that simultaneously strip away detail(tissues decay, only some components are mineralized, skeletons are disrupted) and reveal subtle hints of things (internal anatomy, distribution of hard and soft tissues, manner of death, etc.) that may not have even been readily visible during life or use.

A concrete casting of something weathers just like a lump of concrete. The camera, though, or the controller, would decay in a completely different, and much subtler, way.
Stjohn

Casting a Technics SL1200MkII in concrete is redundant.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=5310808 Christopher Locke

Where have I seen this concrete “fossil” of an atari joystick before? Oh yeah… This guy: http://boingboing.net/2009/05/19/more-fossilized-mode.html
- BoulderBay
  
  Having just followed Christopher Locke’s link above, I would say ‘great minds think alike’. We’ve been making Future Fossils for a couple years and were unaware of Modern Fossils. That being said, we are now fans of Heartless Machine! – Bughouse
mccrum

The way Olympus is going, they might be fossils sooner rather than later.
Blake Simpkins

woohoo! my cousin is half of bughouse. check out there other art series’ as well.
http://www.bughouse.com/index.cfm
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OAUXAA362EXWLYVMPJOKLFB5JQ Incipient Madness

Would plastic fossilize? Doesn’t seem porous enough for minerals to replace the organics.
http://twitter.com/mathewsheffield matthew piggwick

As bughouse correctly state themselves, it is cement, not concrete the items are made from. Aggregate is the primary difference.