Signal Traces

Signal Traces is a sand sculpture part of the project Cultivating Probability. It relates to different forms of sand and tin divination and the materials used in the production of printed circuit boards. The tin is melted into the sand, and the yellow sand is burned on the surface.

Cultivating Probability is based on research into the way how people in different times and cultures try to predict and influence decision-making processes and the future paths of specific situations. Some of the objects in the installation are interpretations of ceremonial objects found in the collections of The National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands that were made to predict – or ward off – the future. Others are influenced by historical as well as contemporary objects, rituals, or technologies that are used to predict or influence the future around the world.

The sculptural objects part of Cultivating Probability speculate and unite attitudes and rituals from different cultures and periods of time into a kind of fictional anthropological display. The installation consists of a collection of diverse objects, which are spread throughout the exhibition space, where some are susceptible to change and movement.

“These installations seem to transfer a ‘primitive’ magical indeterminacy into a modern industrial processing that includes chemicals, metals and electricity. A little drama is staged in any act of magic or divination: the future that is supposed to be written and read is disproportionally larger than what the magician-artist with her instruments can read. The magician-artist can imagine figures of the future and map them out – as Claude Levi-Strauss would say – like a miniature that compensates for the small-scale diagram by providing ‘intelligible dimensions’.” – from: ‘Decommissioned Truths Marjolijn Dijkman’s Cultivating Probability’ by Vlad Ionescu, 2017