Residual Current

“Residual Current explores how energy, matter, and memory persist beneath the surface of our technologies—haunting, shaping, and connecting us to deep histories of the colonization and technologization of the Earth.” — Boris Kostadinov

Handmade copper solar panels face the window, harvesting sunlight. Their fluctuating energy feeds a custom circuit mounted on a copper plate, driving an e-ink display that renders the slow growth of a metal crystal. The pattern shifts throughout the day and over the run of the show, accumulating and decaying with the available light.

Copperpoint drawings diagram relationships between geology and media in the context of Freiburg—birthplace of both German media theory and the mining practices that powered colonial extraction. As metallurgy turns earth into resource, media theory turns toward the material substrates beneath surfaces. Yet both risk losing something in the process: the affective residues that persist in matter and media alike.