- Immediate Response
When I first stumbled across the piece ‘Future Artifact’ by Ivan Toth Depeña, I was instantly reminded of the classic Pixar movie: Wall-E. I began visualizing the scene where the Wall-E, the robot, is compacting and shooting out cubes of trash and arranging them in a similar fashion as the art piece. Upon closer inspection, I noticed homogeneity in the trash being used. They were all Pepsi cans? In my head, I exclaimed the obvious, ‘this must have something to do with the soda company,’ and started to search the background for any hints as to why the art piece was located there.
- Objective Description.
Future Artifact is a giant cube that must be two meters tall. It stands on one of its corners that is buried into a concrete slab on the ground with lights and anti-skateboard studs. The giant cube itself is composed of 4 by 4 by 4 compacted cubes of pepsi soda cans. The smaller cubes are smooth to the touch, indicating that they are either encapsulated in resin or inside some transparent container. These smaller cubes are sandwiched in place by shiny blue L-shaped brackets along the edges of the giant cube. In the background, there is outdoor restaurant furniture to the right and a subway station to the left.
- Technical Decisions
The description of the art piece gives a lot of background information that wasn’t apparent from visual inspection. The art piece was created from the remnants of the first pepsi bottling plant, and resides near to where the plant used to be. The crushed cans are sealed to give the impression that they are supposed to last a long time and serve as a ‘future artifact’. While the bottling plant no longer exists, the art acts as a memorial and a way to ‘remind viewers of the past’. It is possible that the artist wanted to include some ambiguity in this piece. It is up to the viewer to decide what this piece means to them.
- The Work in the World
To the average viewer, the art piece looks like a giant cube of trash. Judging by the materials used, this art piece does not serve as a commemoratory artifact to the first Pepsi bottling plant, but rather to criticize how much trash the world is producing. One interpretation is that the piece is foreshadowing a world similar to the world in the movie Wall-E, where the Earth becomes uninhabitable due to the vast amount of trash that we have generated.
- The Story it Tells
Although we are limited by the short description the artist provides us about the piece, it is clear that there could be many different interpretations of this art piece. Like I mentioned in the previous section, this piece might allude to the growing pollution problem we are facing in the word, but it could also convey how the surrounding community has developed after the demolition of the bottling plant, or the economic opportunities the plant brought with it. The piece is very well preserved, hence the name, and will serve to provide the history of the place for many years to come.
