Industrial Evolution

© Courtesy of the artist and Meessen De Clercq, Brussels

The Industrial Evolution series is a set of one hundred photographs of one hundred objects, taken from twenty Birmingham factories that are still manufacturing today; the final vestiges of the glory days of the industrial past. The presentation of each object in pairs references both Noah’s Ark and the production and serial production characteristic of this type of manufacture. However, a more thorough observation will reveal miniature differences in size, colour, and shape, showing the impossibility of mass cloning, of entirely numeric reproduction that runs to the closest nanometre. Was the industrial revolution in fact a failure?