"Each Human Battery" was commissioned by Noosa Regional Council and shown on the Noosa Coastal Boardwalk as part of “Floating Land: Escape Making” from June to July 2025.
Each telescope shows a possible future view of the surrounding landscape, in a time when money no longer exists, where energy has become the primary means of measuring and exchanging value, and where the human body has become a potential power source.
“You hark from the petrochemical epoch, that distant time ruled by money. We now think of that ancient artefact called money as archaic, unnecessarily abstract, and the source of many of the cruelties and crises of human-kind. Money almost wiped out the human species, it’s as simple as that. Luckily, as the old systems collapsed with the fall of the petrochemical epoch, a new way of being was established.
As the petrochemical epoch ended, and wealth, power and resources were redistributed, the archaic and abstract use of money as the basis of most human economies was replaced. Instead, energy became the key means of attributing, measuring and exchanging value. With the necessarily rapid development of these shifts, society saw massive initial upheavals, and then a gradual settling into the current era, where we live within our individual and collective means, as measured by each human battery.”
Final image by Warwick Gow. All other images by the artist and Jem Selig Freeman.