Gallery Entry
Past, Present, Future
By Marthijn de Groot · NL
Past, Present, Future explores the relationship between human creativity, technological change and the passage of time. The starting point is a physical sculpture I created from an approximately 160-year-old oak ox yoke from southern France. Once a functional object used for human and animal labour, the yoke has lost its original purpose. I transformed it into a sculptural work carrying three distinct elements. The left element, Past, is porcelain with a Chinese celadon-inspired glaze. It refers to history, tradition, craftsmanship and cultural exchange. The central element, Present, is made from iron and finished in a metallic red. It represents the intensity and speed of the present: transformation, technology and a world in constant motion. The right element, Future, is ceramic with blue-green tones. Its open, upward-moving form represents an unknown future: something not yet determined, but already beginning to take shape. The work was originally inspired by an old rural painting depicting a world in which human life, animals and physical labour were inseparable. Much of that world has disappeared. Horses and oxen were once essential to transportation and agriculture; today machines have taken over their work. In the same way, artificial intelligence is now beginning to take over functions that until recently appeared uniquely human. For this submission I deliberately introduced my physical sculpture to AI and asked the technology to reinterpret the work and its underlying idea. The resulting image therefore becomes a fourth layer: not Past, Present or Future itself, but a possible vision of what Future might mean. The central question is not whether AI can make an image. It is what happens to human creativity, intuition, memory and experience when machines increasingly acquire abilities that once belonged exclusively to us. Past, Present, Future places an old object, a contemporary human-made sculpture and an AI interpretation into one visual conversation. The physical artwork remains the human starting point. AI becomes the mirror through which the future looks back at it.