Tucked deep in the bowels of every apartment building I’ve ever lived in, I always seem to find some manner of wooden box, a cupboard, really, that houses the most complex route of technology I know about. As far as I can tell, these are the master boards for our old landlines (that’s telephones, folks) and though they’re generally covered in all manner of dust, web and debris each has seemed somehow faintly futuristic to me, as though holding promise of some new, grand invention. Look at it. Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect to find if you tore the DeLorean apart from Back to the Future 2? They always make me think of science. Not science in the sense it holds today, some mixture of colliders with doomsday, warming predictions, all texted on a Blackberry but science was it was for the nerdy kids like myself in the 80’s. This science was done in basements on something slightly pre-apple. It’s application was always inventive and usually involved some manner of robot, plot involving the USSR or eventual spaceship. I took this photo in the hopes that you might take a moment to think about them, to see them as I do.
Whenever I’ve stumbled upon one of these (and nobody, not even the phone company, is ever looking for them, not directly anyhow. Mostly, they’re discovered the same way one notices a bit of moss or mushroom wile trying to find there way round a tree or over a bush [one might then be inclined to ask, 'Thomas, how often is it that one is trying to find there way round a tree or over a bush?" but I don't think that's relevant and I’ll pretend you didn't ask]) I am momentarily caught up in them, my interest transfixed, as my eyes negotiate along their lines, their twists, their sinewy patterns which appear sometimes to branch out in no particular direction, only to plunge back round thirty other wires and be the only one of them seeming to have any purposeful termination. From an artistic standpoint, I find these smatterings of wires to be fairly charming, and one of the few synthetic creations that seems to me deserving of the throw-up-ably cliché term, ‘organic.’
What I find even more fascinating is to think that all of our conversations are carried in and around systems like these, tucked all over the world. The waste and history and inefficiency of it all, the utter lack of simple elegance is, in some way, a marvel unto itself. Let’s all remember that the inside of your new apple is, by some measure or proxy, not much different.
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