In Eternal Trace (2024), currently on view at 1215 Gallery in Montreal after its debut at Germany’s 16art8 Gallery as part of Fragmented Wholeness, multimedia artist Jialin Wu advances her exploration of ecological grief, sensory entanglement, and the ontological tension between presence and disappearance. The work, a short video composed of a glitching, computer-generated tree whose thousands of nodes cascade into dense root systems beneath the earth before exploding into cosmic, digital chaos, draws the viewer into a speculative choreography of growth, dissolution, and memory. Paired with a spoken text that functions as both elegy and incantation, the piece encapsulates Wu’s broader commitment to systems-based artmaking in which perception, decay, and ritual are staged as unstable but persistent conditions.
Wu, a London-based artist with a background in information experience design, has spent the past half-decade developing a practice at the intersection of museography, death studies, and transmedia storytelling. Her early work Maze (2020), a scent-based installation inspired by Chinese incense clocks, introduced sensory dislocation as a means of temporal reorientation. More recent projects such as Life After Death and POD: Oppossum Shrimps (2022) shift toward posthumanist allegory, imagining afterlives not as ends but as generative liminalities. In Unguide (2022), Wu deconstructs institutional authority by retooling the museum audio guide into a poetic, self-aware voiceover, offering a new politics of historical imagination.
Eternal Trace inherits these concerns but pares them back. There is no overt didacticism, no visible iconography of death. Instead, there is the tree. Or rather, the becoming-tree: a glitch-ridden digital simulation, flickering at its edges, cascading from skyward crown into subterranean root. The camera tunnels downward, past flickers of bark and tremoring nodes, revealing an immense root network rendered as both living archive and digital scar. This sensory confrontation acts as a rejection of stable iconography, what Hito Steyerl calls the “poor image” aesthetic: one that embraces fragmentation and compression not as failures, but as conditions of contemporary seeing.
The accompanying voiceover speaks in spare, elliptical lines: “We drift through the world, neither fixed nor permanent, just traces… shifting between flesh memory and time.” As the visuals plunge beneath the surface and dissipate, the language follows: “Cities rise, forests fade, machines hum beneath the earth’s pulse.” These phrases are not explanatory; they are affective resonations of the Anthropocenic fatigue Wu names in her exhibition text, a world in which “what we know about the environmental effect of everything we touch will soon prevent us from touching anything in the same manner.” In this, Wu aligns with thinkers like Dipesh Chakrabarty, who has argued that the Anthropocene collapses the distinction between human history and natural history, forcing an encounter with the species-level consequences of individual and collective action. Yet rather than assert the monumental scale of this epoch, Wu’s approach feels intimate, personal, and devoted: she offers an immersive alignment between form, feeling, and ecological time.
This is a poetics of dissolution, not despair. The work resists total closure or moral instruction. Instead, Eternal Trace performs a quiet recalibration, inviting the viewer to inhabit a state of perceptual porosity where human and nonhuman, digital and organic, are no longer cleanly divisible. In the final lines – “To exist is to reveal, to see, to feel, until the lines between self and world dissolve” — Wu sketches a kind of sensorial ethics that replaces dominion with entanglement, and spectacle with subsurface attention. Eternal Trace does not offer resolution so much as propose a mode of witnessing – a way of staying with the trouble, to borrow Donna Haraway’s phrase, without recourse to mastery or distance. It extends Wu’s wider project of unsettling fixed architectures of meaning — whether institutional, ecological, or existential – but this resists narrative closure in favor of proliferative, fragmentary encounters. The speculative apparatus is stripped back, distilled into gesture and rhythm.
Wu’s practice has long explored the fragile thresholds between presence and absence, life and afterlife, knowledge and forgetting In Eternal Trace, these concerns find new expression through the inherent impermanence of the digital form itself: its glitches, its compressions, its inevitable obsolescence. It is both a monument and memento mori; a reminder that neither the digital nor the organic can escape time’s erosion. What remains is the trace: partial, unstable, and, perhaps for that reason, insistently alive.
