the last object on earth
The timeline and rationale attempt to answer the design questions: how did the world "end?" what events led up to this point? why and how did this last object survive, and what is the narrative that accompanies it?
rationale:
By 2080, the Earth was decimated and abandoned, falling deeper into the mess of an atomic wasteland. All was still and quiet, except for the whistle of the wind through piles of rubble and the lapping of toxic ocean waves hitting the shores. The sun and moon still rose and set together, day in and day out, but there was no one alive to see them, and no way for the light to reach the ground through the soot covering the sky. It was nuclear winter, and the only thing left unscathed was a robot named Robbie, curled up in a chamber 50 feet below the deepest bomb crater. The Queer Artist Coalition had begun assembling him from found objects and mechanical parts in 2050, as America fell deeper and deeper into the Final War (after Trump’s dictatorship but before the chasm of socio-economic divides ignited World War III). Above him is the chimney he dug on his route deeper into the earth. He waits patiently for sun and warmth to reach his sensors, at which point he will begin the long journey climbing and digging up to the surface.
In his belly compartment, Robbie holds a dvd of Dani Restack’s “Feral Domesticity Video Trilogy” – a lesbian origin story, the only surviving origin story to represent all that humans were – beside a two page script, written on the back of an old photograph, to be recited out loud by the first beings to discover our time capsule.