When talking about transience of human culture, and how once valuable symbols can deteriorate into contextless, insignificant corruptions of themselves, aquarium decoration, accidentally, is a quintessential manifestation. Roman architecture, Chinese artifacts, Buddhist symbols, unrecognizable ruins, all imagery of ancient and (often) extinct civilizations, once submerged with value and layers of meaning, now but a symbol for something we want to simplify as much as possible. The statues are unauthentic par excellence, though they try to imitate authenticity through a decayed appearance that contradicts the water resistant plastic in many ways.
          In DAB DECO: Hyperreal Figures I try to decontextualize the identity of our present-day (online) society and generalize it in the same way we generalize other extinct civilizations. It is a fast-forward of centuries, millennia or eons, an exploration for the post-human identity of our culture. How do people or aliens (or in this case: fish) look back at the endeavours of humanity without understanding our contexts? Contexts that even for ourselves are often difficult to grasp because of the speed of our mass-media online society.