archive.fetch(matter).map(earth)

archive.fetch(matter).map(earth) challenges the stagnant human-centric material realities found in the archival classifications of the Rijksmuseum. A real-time computation draws spatial and temporal maps of the materials used in a selection of objects, using archival data fetched from the museum’s open-source API. These cartographies accumulate and overlap, probing the spatial, temporal, and ecological depths of the material plenitude in the museum’s archive. The spatial cartographies map the artefact’s material constituents to resemble the strata of the Earth. The temporal cartographies juxtapose the artefacts’ production date with the timescale of its materials. The result expands the narrow understanding of artefacts as human creations, to recognise the artefact as emergent of expansive planetary forces.