 
  
On the existence of the Black Box is more than a critique; it is a speculative artefact of Irish cosmotechnics. It does not reject technology outright. Instead, it takes a piece of universal technology—the iPhone—and re-situates it within a local cosmology represented by the soil and the sacred water on a rag from Brigid's Well. The work unites the cosmic order (the living earth, the sacred site) and the technical order (the iPhone, the code), but it does so not to provide a harmonious resolution, but to hold them in a state of productive tension. It questions technology's claim to universality by grounding it in a specific place, demanding that we consider its presence not as an abstract, global force, but as something that touches the soil, is held in our hands, and is shaped by our histories. By doing so, The Black Box performs the essential task of art in our time: it creates a “de-colonial crack" in the smooth surface of the technological world, prompting us to ask what other relationships between the cosmic, the moral, and the technical might be possible. If art can forge such artefacts that challenge the very foundations of our technological reality, what then is its role in an era defined by the very technological thinking that, for Heidegger, signalled the completion and "end of philosophy"?
On The Existence of a Black Box
Discursive Relations
• Medium: Laser-cut birch ply box, old iPhone, cotton rag, soil, custom video loop featuring time-lapse of the process of soil chromatography blended with processing visuals.
• Dimensions: 300mm x 200mm x 200mm.
• Exterior: The box is sealed and stained with a dark patina. The top surface is finely engraved with a soil chromatography image. A letterbox opening with small linen rag (to use as a handle) is at one end of the box.
• Interior: The interior is painted matte black. It contains an old iPhone screen facing the observer (when they look through the opening) playing a looped video.
• Interaction: The observer uses the cotton rag to hold up the door that covers the opening. The rag is part of a number of rags the artist has worked with at Brigid's Well, Faughart, Co. Louth.
 
                        