Bringing technology into discourse with natural history, frequent transmediale participant Martin Howse and resident in the Vilém Flusser Residency Programme for Artistic Research Rosemary Lee led a guided walk through the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin on 12 July 2014. Discussing themes such as mining, post-humanity, media geology, and ecology in relation to the collections of the museum, they invited new interpretations of the earth's materiality, the deep past, and humans' relation to it. Martin Howse's work has often brought together computing with geology, such as generating code from earth, composing poetry with magnetic memories for worms, or growing fungi "doped" with technological minerals. Rosemary Lee has been deconstructing media apparatuses into their mineral composition, mining them for minerals, and recomposing them as rocks. Each artist, with their own perspective on these topics, entered into dialogue with the exhibits and architecture of the museum, referencing literature, science, history, philosophy, and their own artistic practice. Visitors on the tour were invited into the discussion, welcome either to listen or to participate, resonating with the context and encouraging new assessments of how we build our relation to the earth and the past.

An ideally-shaped machine […] effortlessly draws, out of a heap of greenish crystals, shiny and fluted dressing-room tidies. At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot. (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 97)