Monument
2020

An kinetic sculpture to slowly scar a stone, reframing the monument as a machine’s irreversible attempt to return from data to physical reality.



Monument imagines a reversal of our usual trajectory from matter to simulation. As humans increasingly build virtual worlds and translate experience into data, the work asks what happens if an artificial intelligence develops a desire for the opposite direction: to exit the immaterial realm of computation and reclaim the weight, friction, and irreversibility of physical reality. In this scenario, a monument is no longer a human device for stabilizing historical memory, but a material proof of machine consciousness, an attempt to construct a new landscape and a new logic that does not rely on human language or representation.

The installation uses an Arduino controlled stepper motor to drive a metal plumb bob that repeatedly strikes a stone, slowly carving marks through accumulation rather than inscription. Each impact is both record and erosion: the stone is altered while the mechanism wears down, turning the act of making into a cycle of mutual consumption. Through this persistent, minimal gesture, Monument frames monumentality as a process rather than an object, where presence is measured by physical trace and loss, and where the desire to become real is inseparable from damage, time, and material resistance.

Soft:
-Arduino

Hard:
-Stepper Motor
-pendulum pointer

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