Residue Looking

The world is littered with footmarks of invisible processes. These traces are direct physical consequences of systemic operation. They accumulate as the material archaeology of process, where time and movement congeal into a single form paused in matter. Each variation among those temporal extractions uncovers the logic and beauty intrinsic to a system, and demonstrates its distinctive characteristics, residue by residue.

Because every variation invites comparison, patterns manifest and stimulate the mind while expanding knowledge of the system's built-in movements. What begins as scattered marks soon feels like a language that begs to be interpreted and archived.

Every operating system builds such a proprietary archive of material traces. Geological processes leave strata, biological processes leave fossils, cultural processes leave artifacts. Once this ubiquity registers, these residues stand out as landmarks that form the basis of understanding, render the world intelligible and imbue it with meaning.

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The concept of residue turns self-reflexive in Mike Balzer's (pxlshrd) practice. From Breeding Grounds through Rückkopplung to Conversations and finally Residue, each project extends and reworks the techniques and styles of its predecessors. Collectively, the works coalesce into their own archaeological deposit, a chain of temporal extractions from an ongoing creative system that defines Balzer's abstract visual language.