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"Transition"

Artwork by Artist Adrian Ward

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“Transition”, created in pure silver bullion by Australian artist Adrian Ward, explores humanity’s evolving relationship with information—from the first written records of 5500 years ago to the emerging digital reality of the present.

Writing marked the birth of a new technology: one more precise and enduring than oral tradition. It allowed people to send their exact words across time, educate future generations, and accumulate the wisdom that propelled civilisation forward.

One of the great milestones of this trajectory occurred in the late 8th century with The House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the intellectual centre of the Abbasid Golden Age. As a cornerstone of the Transition Movement, scholars translated vast libraries of knowledge—including Greek scientific and philosophical texts—into Arabic. Their work crystallised the foundations of the scientific method. Although the House of Wisdom was ultimately destroyed, the ideas preserved and advanced there seeded the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment in the West.

Centuries later, the invention of the Gutenberg Press represented another decisive leap, making written knowledge accessible to the wider public for the first time. Today, we stand inside yet another shift: the digitisation of text and the migration from page to screen.

 

“I see our current transition as a silver age of communications,” the artist says. “We are moving from book to screen. The golden age of communications will likely involve biological integration with digital devices and artificial intelligence. At that point, we may no longer need to store vast amounts of information internally—this could free our consciousness or leave us helpless without our digital genie.”

In “Transition”, Ward questions what we may lose in the move away from physical knowledge toward information that exists only in a temporal, electronic state. The artwork appears to glitch or fragment, suggesting that this evolution may be unstable, disorienting, or incomplete.

 

“A book is an intimate experience of information transfer,” Ward notes.
“Digital communication, by contrast, often feels like stepping into the collective stream of present-moment human thought—rapid, shapeshifting, and easily distorted. Education, ultimately, must give us the tools to recognise truth and value regardless of the medium.”

Ward works exclusively in pure silver bullion, making him the only contemporary artist whose sculptural practice centres on bullion silver and gold. He chooses this material intentionally: silver is constantly valued and revalued every nanosecond through global communication technologies, a commodity whose worth is tied directly to the flow of information.

 

“For me, the value of ideas is itself a form of wealth,” Ward explains.

In “Transition”, both the silver bullion and the ideas it embodies maintain their inherent value—unlike the physical book, which decays and disappears. Art, communication, education, and the technology that carries them are already moving toward a new horizon:
the golden age of the digital reality.