Artist’s Corner: Leo Mercer - Blogpost 2

Follow Leo Mercer's journey into the 50 Jewish Objects, through his own words.

The Year 3,000

When looking at the leaps within the 2000 year journey sketched by the 50 Jewish Objects, it’s hard not to start projecting to the future too.

From 200BCE, we have the earliest surviving Greek fragments of the Deuteronomy, tiny centimetres of fragments written onto papyrus.

From 1,100CE, we have chunks from Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, written onto heavy paper.

From 1955, we have archives full of information on the Jewish community in Manchester: documentation of Jewish refugees, artefacts related to the growth of Haredi communities in Manchester, and so on.

Which, of course, gets you thinking.

The objects show the change in material from papyrus to paper and now to digitalisation, with more and more information recorded each century.

When, in the year 3,000, the galaxy-renowned University Centauri holds its exhibition of 500 Jewish objects, what will those more recent objects look like? What stories will they tell?

Indecipherable hard drives, USB sticks and SD cards full of trillions of pictures of 21st century life? Excavated data centres with traces of huge data sets about life in action from 2300? Patchy 3D-recreations of interplanetary Jewish environments from the 2500s? Perfectly kept Jewish quantum-artworks from the 2700 kept on a museum planet?

We can only imagine.