Rare Earth Sculptures: LANTHANUM (Installation I, 2014)

First presented as a decorative table-sculpture in Obicà Mozzarella Bar, Canary Wharf, London, and later installed inside a Prius for Future Gallery, Berlin (2015), LANTHANUM operates as a stealth object camouflaged within corporate and consumer ecologies. Constructed from polystyrene, fiberglass, acrylic, and displayed on an Arqspin rotating stand, the work draws on the hidden significance of its namesake element — a critical component in hybrid-car batteries and emblematic of the extractive infrastructures underpinning “green” technologies. LANTHANUM is entangled with the speculative entity The Centre for Youth Consciousness (CYC), a proposed research facility tasked with mapping shifts in perception and identity among those born after 2000, in the aftermath of Y2K. The sculpture exists as if “reverse swarm-funded” by the CYC: not just produced as an object, but materially constituted from the potential of that institution’s future emergence. As camouflage within privatized zones of commerce and governance, it extends beyond decorative status into an affective instrument — probing how youth, energy, and consciousness are mobilized, co-opted, or resisted within global systems. / ENERGY⋮PANGEA (2010–2019) is an evolving artwork-as-system by Iain Ball that reconfigured sculpture into networks of objects, environments, and psyche. Developed through an unfinished Rare Earth cycle, it probes resource extraction (on/off-world), supply chains, techno-dependence, geopolitics, altered states, UFO speculation, and the tangle of New-Age mysticism with consumer capitalism. This contract preserves the surviving works and archives as authenticated on-chain artifacts—1/1s, series, and editions—each a live node in the ENERGY⋮PANGEA ecology. Provenance, royalties, and metadata are enforced at the protocol level, securing a historically significant post-materialist project and enabling collectors to hold operative fragments that continue to propagate meaning across time and networks. / The Rare Earth Sculpture Project (2011– ) forms the core of ENERGY⋮PANGEA, where each element becomes the anchor for a sculptural system interweaving objects, sound, text, and environment. These NFTs function as components and documents of that wider system, secured on-chain as part of the Legacy Archive. For full texts, images, and extended context, read the series on Paragraph: https://paragraph.com/@energypangea