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"The object survived. Its meaning did not."
For the #FLORAMuseumChallenge, I worked with the Swiss Automaton Frog, ca. 1820 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection.
What interested me most was not only the object itself, but the idea of what could happen to its meaning over time.
This tiny mechanical frog was created as an extraordinary luxury object: intricate, precious, playful, and technically sophisticated. But what if it survived far longer than the civilization that made it?
I imagined the object being rediscovered in the year 2325, when its original purpose had been completely forgotten. Future researchers study it with enormous care and interpret it as a culturally significant relic — perhaps a symbol of power, wealth, nature, or ritual.
The irony is that what they treat with almost sacred seriousness was once simply an exceptional luxury automaton.
Using FLORA, I explored several possible futures for the object: archaeological discovery, sacred misinterpretation, and future museum display. I then refined the strongest direction into a world where the frog itself remains almost unchanged, while everything around it transforms its meaning.
The project became less about imagining the future and more about questioning how we understand the past.
How much of history is truth — and how much is interpretation built around the objects that survive?
The object survived. Its meaning didn't.
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