In the distant future, fragments of objects are unearthed by archaeologists at an array of Anthropocene-era sites around what was once London. Strange relics of unclear purpose, the artifacts are interpreted and “remembered” using Machine Learning. In a future log entry, an archaeologist catalogues them in a digital archive and speculates about their provenance. As the archivist inventories the artifacts, we learn the context of their discovery and the material story of their preservation, and a future “memory” of their original purpose. This project acts to prompt a conversation about our current waste culture-a conceptual framework that aims to dispel our blindness to the future we are creating. It engages us to reflect upon the material lifespan of the objects that surround us and will outlive us, by reimagining our current waste stream as the uncanny relics of a forgotten past, archeological evidence of our late capitalist death wish. It encourages us to consider instead an approach to design that harnesses renewable raw materials or waste byproducts; incredible materials imbued with rich geological history [materials such as fordite, trinitite or plastiglomerate]. By reorienting the context of our present consumption to consider our future legacy of waste, we can radically rethink how we use and consume and avoid a toxic future of massive midden mounds of trash and eerie mummified corpses of consumer objects.

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