Mercier (New Mexico, 2012)

Mercier is a companion work to Camier, and is part of the Pathetic Landscape series (continuing from Tut Tut and Let's Go)

As Beckett's characters attempt to leave the City, so these works are a futile attempt to get lost in a landscape which is always already archived.

An object is digitally recorded onto a database of objects as an augmented reality trigger with a companion virtual object. That object is placed into a blue balloon and is left to wander in the scrub desert until it finds a cactus or sharp stone and the balloon fulfils its destiny leaving the object to dwell in that place free from any conscious intent, to all intents and purposes lost. Until, maybe in a few hours, maybe in a few millennia the object is discovered and a picture taken, or perhaps the global systems for archiving the world become so detailed that every small element is catalogued, then the databases of the infinite archive will connect the real and the virtual and both will fulfil their destiny.