This artwork by the Belgian couple Tom and Lien Dekyvere was part of Canary Wharf’s festival of winter lights, but has since been adopted into the permanent collection.

It is a boulder made from discarded circuit boards. It lights up, but I vastly prefer it in its daytime mode, where it looks much more like a boulder and much less like a twinkly trinket.

When I’ve seen this work previously, I’ve taken it as a commentary on the impact of technology on the earth’s natural resources: all those rare earth metals returning to the rocky form from whence they came. The growth of artificial intelligence, with its outsized carbon emissions, felt like it lent the sculpture extra contemporary relevance.

In the course of writing this blog post, though, I’ve discovered that my interpretation does not align with the artists’ intention, which is more about highlighting the imperfection of digital representations of the physical world—which, I suppose, explains the garish light display.

I also thought the label was misprinted, and should have been ‘El Antica’, which I assumed to be Belgian for ‘the antique’, but that’s a load of rubbish too.