Residual Current

Residual Current, 2025

handmade solar panels, generative algorithm, e-ink display, custom hardware

Residual Current’s copper solar panels, partially transformed into copper oxide through heat treatment and using salt water electrolyte, generate power through exposure to sunlight. The panels create subtle energy flows that are used by an electronic mechanism to conjure generative images of metal crystals accumulating over time, their emergence governed by geological rather than computational rhythms. The work’s title derives from the electrical phenomenon of residual current—energy that persists in a circuit after the main flow has ceased.

This residual energy carries traces of the technological infrastructure’s material origins: mines, colonial histories, and ecological disruptions. The copper panels oxidize and shift with environmental conditions, making visible the relationship between technological infrastructure and natural processes. E-ink displays receive unstable power flows from the copper cells, producing images that slowly grow, and never fully resolve. This instability proposes “rewilded” computational processes where natural fluctuations, seasonal changes, and material degradation become essential system elements. The generated crystal drawings remain in perpetual flux, responsive to immediate environmental conditions, accumulated time effects, and material decay.

The e-ink display’s unique properties shift our thinking about computational images’ relationship to energy. These displays require no power to maintain an image, only to change it, holding their ghostly pictures long after power has ceased flowing. As daylight wanes and the copper panels lose their solar input, the displays retain their crystalline formations like memory traces, creating a visual record of the system’s energy states over time. This temporal persistence creates images that exist beyond the immediate flow of electricity, suggesting digital media that require patience and contemplation rather than continuous power.

Residual Current deliberately embraces noise, unpredictability, and the visible presence of its own infrastructure. Rather than hiding computational apparatus within sleek interfaces, the work exposes copper, circuits, and the weathering effects of time. The installation operates as a meditation on the hidden material costs embedded within our digital technologies, proposing a computational ethos rooted in cyclicality, decay, and ecological symbiosis.

The installation invites viewers to sense unseen energies—the afterlives of minerals and media, the echoes of extraction, the persistent entanglements shaping our digital world. Copper serves as both medium and material statement, maintaining its properties through multiple cycles of use, from ancient medical devices to chip manufacturing. Through material choices, temporal strategies, and core principles, the work addresses the ESC challenge by creating alternative possibilities for experiencing computation media—slower, more attentive, integrated with natural systems. It proposes that technological futures require fundamentally reimagined relationships with the materials and energies already flowing through our digital lives.