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“The Appearance of Life”
Natalia Zuluaga

Brian W. Aldiss’ The Appearance of Life is set on a planet several lightyears away from Earth,
where humans have colonized a pre-existing structure that stretches around the planet’s equator
and turned it into a museum. At this site, androids tirelessly catalog and archive the history of the
galaxy, including its cultural artifacts and the spoils of colonial conquests. These androids,
working ad nauseam, arrange exhibits that are digitally preserved and made available to human
counterparts across the colonies for study or viewing. The objects on display range from the
microscopic, such as micro-organisms, to the monumental, like battleships and plundered
churches. The museum is so vast that it would take another fifteen millennia to reach its full
capacity. The story is narrated by a female researcher who explains the importance of her work
and the many parties invested in her findings, such as the university program asking her to sift
through “galactic lumber” to prove the hypothesis that the human voice has grown quieter over
millennia. Although researchers on Earth and elsewhere can review individual objects remotely,
forming a “gestalt view is only possible through the presence of a physical seeker.

During her perusals, the researcher comes across a “holocap:” a featureless cube that, when
activated, projects the face of a young woman. The hologram is programmed to “speak” only
when placed in front of her husband’s holocap. Upon finding his cube in a pile set for sorting, the
researcher joins them so they can “talk.” She soon discovers that the holograms were created
years apart—hers while she awaited his return from an intergalactic battle, and his as a final
farewell before his sacrificial death in war. Once placed together, the holograms play their
scripts, but they fall out of sync with each loop, rendering their “dialogue” increasingly
meaningless. The discord between these objects brings into sharp relief the realization that we
are not the heroic architects of a grand narrative arc, but rather the products of the detritus of our
imaginations—both material and informational—drifting forward amidst accelerated change.
Even as we build the future, we remain tethered to the past, and at the same time blind to the
creative life these copies we create may or may not sow on their own.

Somewhere in this vast equatorial museum, between the first scanned UPC code and the creation
of the first JPG image, is where I imagine finding the objects from Rafael Domenech’s Prologue:
Residual Images in Italics. Just as Aldiss’ museum stores the cultural remains of a galaxy,
Domenech archives and arranges the leftovers of his world: paper, lumber, spray paint, domestic
and commercial objects. The “gestalt view” of these objects—to borrow from Aldiss’s narrator in
order to see this work as a whole— reveals how labor and material culture intersect, telling a
story about inventories, surpluses, and the bodies that create and are shaped by them.

Phrases like “governed ornaments,” “manicured as tortured,” and “dissonant sunsets” are
scattered throughout these works. They could be directing us toward deeper meanings—or, more
likely, are a scatological accumulation of messages in a world overwhelmed by data, where
knowing everything still manages to keep meaning fragmented and elusive. Domenech’s books-
cum-architecture and geology-cum-books are carved and pieced together so that egg crates and
rocks can emerge from these hybrid forms. These objects don’t break through or rupture the
surfaces of his graphic compositions and flattened books, nor are they collaged together. Instead,
like the holograms in Aldiss’ story, Domenech’s materials coexist spatially and temporally—they
share geographies and borders creating fault lines and producing tensions between information,
noise, labor, and material culture.

Plasma-cut assemblages resembling emblems—or are they frisbees!?—hang above the
exhibition. Their ragged, burned edges depict laser-etched icons like an eagle and a two-headed
lion perched atop a turtle. These images are culled from visual detritus—fragments of memory
that linger and are burned from passing the botanicas that used to adorn Miami’s working-class
neighborhoods. The friction between the heat of plasma and the material produces jagged,
nervous edges that stand in stark contrast to the clean, graphic lines of the other works, signaling
at the strain between hand and machine, labor, and object. This idea of labor—the laser-cut
words transformed into objects, the spray paint, the stubborn insistence on assemblage—alludes
to a human body embedded within all this data. In fact, in a moment of self-referential humor,
the artist renders himself visible through a piece that combines a found book titled RAPHAEL
with a laser-cut wooden ticker that declares: “I only own my capacity to work.” It’s a poignant
reminder that these discrete objects, ornamental nods to images and the decay of information, are
ultimately just punch cards for the artist’s labor—a job whose only surplus is paper and data.

In this space, images are fixed sculpturally but occupy a conceptual space where they shift
between screens, memories, and physical forms while bodies—ours and the artist’s—coexist
with the ruins of ideas, capital, and desires. The labor embedded in these works translates flesh
into materials, into labor monetized and circulated. Our gaze traverses this terrain encountering
an unease between flesh and flatness: flesh translated into labor, commodified, and circulated
into a dead state, kept alive only by the hum and vibrations of servers, by the heat of the plasma
cutter, by the precision of CNC machine. Here, we witness the birth of dead matter—objects
animated by data, but devoid of life. Jaded beyond the era of mechanical reproduction, each
duplication that emerges from the surplus of Domenech’s previous works now resembles a new
cell in these works, with its own cycle of life, death, use, exchange, and mutability. Like the
holocaps in Aldiss’s story the works live, die, and exist as images—flickering between presence
and absence, remnants of a humanity divided into the smallest possible units. But who controls
these traces, these personal and collective ruins—what we once called images? Once they enter
the networked realm, do they multiply and reproduce endlessly? Can we even claim that they are
still part of us?