Totems for a Post-Digital Era - Benjamin Gaulon & Vincent Valéry

Breaking away from digital systems seems almost unthinkable today. Yet the question is more urgent than ever: how can we relate differently to technology, in a way that serves both us as users and the environment in which that technology lives and dies?

For thousands of years, people have placed vertical structures in the landscape: totems, stelae, obelisks and sacred poles that mark a place or create a connection between earth and sky. Today, the antenna takes on that role: a technological column that transmits signals in binary pulses rather than engraved signs.

We are testing this electroculture antenna in the garden of Design Museum Gent and programming the first circuits: a technological totem, rooted in the ground and reaching towards the atmosphere, where electronics coexist with living plants.