We live, we work, we dream. We create. Some people lavish their time, attention, imagination – and love, on machines. Technology.

The first person to take a piece of charcoal out of the fire and use it to draw on a cave wall invented a state-of-the-art technology. Technology evolves, though. It changes. Machines have a lifetime, just like we do. Someone gives birth to them, and loves them. They live, and work – and die.

I look at machines and technology created just one or two generations ago, and I imagine the people who made them, and the time they lived in. I think about which ever-changing laws ruled their universe, their world – their culture. I remember it was once impossible – inconceivable – to travel between continents, or to the moon. I remember that almost everything we take for granted is possible only because we all stand on the shoulders of a thousand generations. A thousand generations of ideas about who we are – and who we might be, about what is possible, what is needed, what is beautiful.

Jean Miele
March 22, 2006

Check out a gallery of Vestiges of Industry: Maritime Studies photos here.