Works Well

TECHNO-ART For a perfect example of technology metamorphosing into art, go to Marja-Leena's website (http://marja-leena-rathje.info/). Under Photoworks click on Found Objects. There, on a beach, is the remains of a car over which a thousand tides have washed. The photos give new meaning to the word bio-degradable. In another twenty years the car will be gone but in the interim there is a tug-of-war between the forces of corrosion and the engineered details of this most typical of man-made structures. Aesthetics is winning. The straight-line members of the chassis are softening into irregular shapes. The gearbox has become a blob, parts of which seem to be carved from soft stone. Only the steering mechanism still proclaims its earlier function but its defiance is clearly doomed. Compared with the slam-bang speed with which the car was put together its decay is much more long-term and therefore strangely poignant. The sea wins.