100 Years Later by Maico Akiba

Time capsules are curious things; they offer the promise of travel through an unnavigable dimension. While fascination around the time capsule can extend from the simple schoolchildren’s anticipation for recovering treasured memories to the involvement of high-tech companies such as Matsushita’s in Expo ’70, Japanese artist Maico Akiba is challenging the concept of waiting with 100 Years Later. The objects in this collection represent his prediction of one hundred years of dirt and time bearing down upon today’s technologies and items, as if they were buried and later unearthed. A Polaroid camera is horribly corroded and the sleek look of the iPhone is overgrown with moss and rust. Other items, such as a velvet ring box and some Mahjong tiles reveal water stains, though the appearance works no damage upon what happy though fictitious memories the objects might have preserved. If anything, the physical loss is made positive by the gracious – albeit cheating – snapshot into the future.