Berry Sullivan — 2026

Still Warm

Cabinets of Latency and Media Afterlife

Ontology may be flat. Ethics is not.

This cabinet contains undoctored photographic documentation of deceased animals, including decomposition and rupture. The work is presented without sanitisation as part of its ethical commitment to honest encounter.

Enter the Cabinet

Project Statement

Still Warm is a digital cabinet of curiosities that brings biological remains and media artefacts into a shared archival space. Rather than assembling a physical collection, the cabinet is constructed through photographic documentation and digital mounting. All biological specimens were encountered in situ and recorded as images, not removed or physically preserved. This approach reflects both an ethical commitment to non-extractive artistic practice and the legal realities governing native Australian fauna, which cannot be collected or retained in any material form, even when found already dead.

The cabinet draws on the historical tradition of the Wunderkammer while critically reworking its extractive logic. Early cabinets of curiosities were built through accumulation, possession, and displacement. Still Warm adopts the cabinet as a conceptual and organisational form rather than a physical repository. The act of collection is replaced by documentation; ownership is replaced by encounter. Objects enter the cabinet as images — traces of presence rather than possessions.

The title refers to a threshold state. The animals recorded in the cabinet were encountered shortly after death, when traces of life remained legible in form, posture, or environment. Warmth here signifies proximity rather than vitality: a closeness to the moment of cessation that resists complete historicisation. Media artefacts in the cabinet — cameras, lenses, storage cards — are similarly positioned in states of recent obsolescence. By presenting biological and technical remains together, Still Warm proposes a shared logic of afterlife across organic and machinic systems.

I. Biological Specimens — Catalogue Raisonné

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.1

Turtle

The turtle is presented upright, supported by visible metal rods, its shell intact and its body stilled. This orientation appears to remove the animal from any natural posture and places it firmly within the logic of display, and yet it is an exact preservation of the found shape of the turtle. The shell, a structure evolved for protection and endurance, becomes legible as a storage medium: layered, insulating, and resistant to time.

In Still Warm, the turtle functions as an index of latency. Its body suggests slowness, deep time, and continuity, while the act of mounting interrupts those qualities through technological intervention. The rod that holds the turtle upright is not concealed; it exposes preservation as an active, imposed process rather than a neutral act of care. Positioned among media artefacts, the turtle's shell parallels archival containers and data enclosures, foregrounding the continuity between biological bodies and technical systems designed to store, protect, and transmit information beyond the moment of life.

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.2

Bird

The bird is presented with its internal structures exposed, its body ruptured rather than sealed. Unlike traditional taxonomic specimens, which aim to restore visual wholeness, this object makes visible the violence inherent in preservation. The bird's interior — normally hidden by skin, feathers, and the conventions of display — is rendered legible, resisting aesthetic closure or symbolic flight.

Within Still Warm, the bird operates as an ethical interruption. It destabilises the neutrality of the vitrine and foregrounds the cost of making bodies knowable. The exposed viscera parallel moments of media failure: corrupted files, torn images, or damaged recordings where internal structures surface unintentionally. By refusing sanitisation, the bird insists that archiving is never passive. Preservation here is not an act of rescue but of transformation, one that converts living matter into evidence while leaving traces of rupture that cannot be fully resolved.

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.3

Frog

The frog is presented as an upright specimen, its body positioned for inspection rather than movement. This posture recalls educational and laboratory displays in which animals are arranged to facilitate observation, comparison, and instruction. Amphibious by nature, the frog occupies a biological threshold between water and land, a condition that has historically made it a favoured subject for experimentation, dissection, and demonstration.

In Still Warm, the frog functions as a pedagogical body. It represents the translation of life into knowledge through controlled exposure and immobilisation. Its presence invokes scientific regimes of looking in which understanding is produced through fixing, isolating, and holding still. Positioned alongside media devices, the frog parallels optical and recording technologies that similarly mediate access to the world. Both organism and apparatus promise clarity through capture, while concealing the epistemic assumptions that shape what can be seen, measured, and retained.

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.4

Crab Claws

The crab claws are presented detached from the body, arranged as paired but unequal instruments. Removed from the organism that animated them, they remain recognisable as tools: mechanisms designed for grasping, cutting, and defence. Their asymmetry introduces hierarchy and function, suggesting dominance, precision, and delegated force.

Within Still Warm, the claws operate as proxies for agency. They echo technological instruments that act on the world at a distance — grips, clamps, lenses, and interfaces — separating action from intention. Like many media tools, the claws retain their form and potential even after the body that coordinated them has been lost. Their presence foregrounds a shift from organism to apparatus, where agency is no longer located in a whole being but distributed across specialised parts. The claws thus bridge biological function and technical instrumentality, marking a transition from embodied action to mediated intervention.

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.5

Pufferfish

The pufferfish is presented whole, its body desiccated yet structurally intact. Known for its ability to inflate when threatened, the pufferfish transforms vulnerability into defence through sudden expansion. Spines emerge, volume increases, and the body becomes both signal and barrier. In its preserved state, this defensive gesture is frozen, no longer reactive but permanently encoded in form.

In Still Warm, the pufferfish functions as a model of self-archiving. Its body materialises a strategy of protection through exaggeration and enclosure, mirroring processes of data compression, buffering, and error signalling in technical systems. The preserved fish holds the trace of a response without the conditions that once activated it. Positioned among media artefacts, the pufferfish suggests that storage and defence are intertwined: to preserve is also to harden, to anticipate threat, and to transform living responsiveness into static structure.

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.6

Fish Head

The fish head is presented as a fragment: teeth, bone, and ocular cavity separated from the body that once animated them. As a partial remainder, it resists narrative completion. What remains is not the fish as organism, but the fish as index — an extracted section preserved for its legibility rather than its wholeness.

Within Still Warm, the fish head operates as a figure of archival cropping. Like a truncated image, a clipped recording, or a corrupted file, it embodies the logic by which preservation often proceeds through reduction. Attention is concentrated on features deemed significant — jaw, eye, structure — while the rest is discarded. This fragmentation exposes the violence implicit in archival selection, where meaning is produced through excision. Positioned among media artefacts, the fish head parallels technical remains that survive only as partial traces, reminding us that what is saved is always shaped by what has been removed.

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.7

Tesla Mouse #4

Fourth of five neonates documented in situ within the front storage compartment of a Tesla Model X 75D, Sydney. The siblings were found together in a delicate nest constructed within an insulated cavity of the vehicle — a space sealed, temperature-regulated, and entirely removed from the ecological systems that would have constituted a natural habitat. Each of the five occupied a distinct posture at the time of discovery, as though arrested mid-gesture. This specimen is presented in the posture of its finding: small, complete, and still. Whether these five constitute the first such litter to have been born and died within a Tesla is, at minimum, plausible.

This encounter was the founding moment of Still Warm. Animals had been documented throughout 2024 and 2025 as part of an extended photographic survey conducted during walks for The 8 Museum, but no prior encounter had made the purpose of that documentation fully legible. Five neonates, born and dead within the chassis of an electric vehicle, demanded something more than a photograph. They demanded a cabinet. Object Oriented Ontology holds that all objects carry equal weight: that a mouse found in a frunk, a turtle encountered on a road, a camera no longer in use, are each deserving of the same ethical attention and the same refusal of hierarchical ranking. Tesla Mouse #4 occupies last position in this catalogue not because it is least, but because it arrived last in understanding — the specimen that made the rest necessary.

I. Biological Specimens — Further Specimens

The following specimens have been documented and mounted.

Spider Wasp

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.8

Sandy Bird

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.9

Pigeon with Red Tile Fragment

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.10

Nesting Bird

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.11

Spined Fish

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.12

Fish

Biological Specimen · Fig 1.13

II. Media Artefacts — Catalogue Raisonné

Media artefacts in the cabinet — cameras, lenses, storage cards — are positioned in states of recent obsolescence. They persist after their moment of functional relevance has passed, retaining physical presence and latent archives while no longer fully integrated into current infrastructures. By presenting biological and technical remains together, Still Warm proposes a shared logic of afterlife across organic and machinic systems. Shells, lenses, housings, and storage cards echo one another formally and conceptually, suggesting that preservation, enclosure, and vulnerability operate across domains.

Media Artefact · Fig 2.1

CompactFlash Cards

The CompactFlash cards are presented as a loose cluster, their labels worn and their contents inaccessible without specialised interfaces. Once ubiquitous in professional digital photography, these storage devices now occupy an ambiguous temporal position: neither fully obsolete nor actively supported. They persist as compact, opaque carriers of unknown data.

These cards were part of my daily working practice for many years. They were constantly carried, swapped, filled, erased, and replaced as capacities increased and speeds improved. This routine dependence rendered them invisible while they were in use, even as they functioned as the primary vessels through which images were captured, stored, and trusted. In Still Warm, the CompactFlash cards function as contemporary fossils. They hold latent archives — images, sequences, moments — without offering immediate access to their contents. Like preserved biological remains, they separate material survival from functional life, emphasising storage as a shared logic across biological and technical systems where meaning is suspended, deferred, and contingent on future acts of recovery.

Media Artefact · Fig 2.2

Cameras

DSLR and Underwater Compact

The cameras are presented together as a paired imaging system: a DSLR designed for deliberate capture and professional control, and a compact underwater camera associated with play, movement, and informal documentation. Both devices translate embodied experience into discrete records, yet they encode different regimes of seeing — one attentive and intentional, the other spontaneous and affective.

These cameras were carried through distinct modes of life. The DSLR functioned as a working prosthesis, shaping how light, time, and framing were consciously negotiated. The underwater camera was used casually, often in family and leisure contexts, recording moments not intended for exhibition or reflection at the time of capture. In Still Warm, the cameras operate as archaeological instruments. They persist after the social and relational contexts that animated them have fractured or receded. What remains are fragments: files, images, and devices that outlast the conditions of their making, marking the conversion of lived intimacy into technical residue where personal histories survive not as narratives but as stored traces awaiting interpretation.

Media Artefact · Fig 2.3

GoPro

Action Camera in Housing

The GoPro is presented sealed within its protective housing, its lens exposed while the body remains enclosed. Designed for environments inhospitable to human perception — underwater, in motion, or embedded within constrained spaces — the device records from positions where the body cannot comfortably remain. Its form prioritises enclosure, durability, and automated capture over deliberation or framing.

This camera was used in medical and infrastructural contexts where discreet, high-quality video was required. Its small size and sealed housing allowed recording to occur without attracting attention or disrupting sensitive environments. In these settings, visibility was not neutral: what could be seen, how it was seen, and who was seen were all ethically charged decisions mediated by the device itself. In Still Warm, the GoPro functions as a model of delegated vision. Once activated, it records independently of continuous human oversight, producing archives without direct witnessing. It marks a shift in media archaeology toward systems where perception persists without presence and memory is generated at a distance from the body.

Media Artefact · Fig 2.4

Camera Lenses

Optical Assemblage

The lenses are presented as a clustered assemblage, detached from any camera body and laid horizontally as exposed optical organs. Designed for precision, clarity, and control, these lenses represent the apex of technical seeing: weighty, fragile instruments engineered to gather light with extreme fidelity. Their glass elements, coatings, and internal mechanisms require careful handling, protection from dust, and constant maintenance.

These lenses were central to my photographic practice. They produced some of my most technically accomplished images, yet they also demanded a physical cost. Transporting them required carrying substantial weight over long periods, a labour that ultimately exceeded what my body could sustain. Care extended beyond use: vigilance against dust, moisture, and abrasion shaped how they were stored, handled, and feared. In Still Warm, the lenses are deliberately placed in proximity to sand — a gesture that feels almost transgressive. This exposure stages a confrontation between precision optics and environmental matter, collapsing regimes of care that once governed their use. They mark the point where technical excellence, bodily endurance, and archival fragility intersect, revealing how instruments of vision carry histories of devotion, damage, and eventual abandonment.

All biological specimens are presented as photographic records only. Encounters documented 2024–2026; cabinet assembled 2026.

No animals were collected, removed, or physically preserved in the making of this work.

Berry Sullivan — 2026

About the Work

This methodology is consistent with my broader research practice in The 8 Museum, which similarly operates through photographic collection rather than physical extraction. In both projects, attention is directed toward phenomena encountered in the world and recorded without intervention. The image becomes the primary archival unit, allowing patterns, repetitions, and resonances to emerge across time without disturbing the material conditions of the objects themselves.

The biological specimens in Still Warm are therefore not preserved bodies, but recorded bodies. Their mounting occurs digitally, through framing, sequencing, and proximity within the cabinet interface. This shift foregrounds photography itself as a media-archaeological process: an act of capture that transforms ephemeral encounters into durable traces. As with technical media, this transformation is not neutral. Selection, framing, and exclusion shape what becomes visible and what remains absent.

The cabinet format enables resonances without collapsing difference. Biological bodies and media devices are not equated, but placed in dialogue through proximity. Shells, lenses, housings, and storage cards echo one another formally and conceptually, suggesting that preservation, enclosure, and vulnerability operate across domains. These similarities emerge not through metaphor but through curatorial arrangement.

Care remains a central concern. Although no biological material is physically handled, the images themselves are the result of attentiveness and restraint. Choosing not to extract or possess becomes an ethical stance, acknowledging that documentation can preserve without ownership. This refusal mirrors shifts in contemporary archival practice that favour access, trace, and relation over accumulation.

Ultimately, Still Warm situates media archaeology in the present tense. It attends to systems that have only just fallen out of use, bodies only recently lost, and technologies whose afterlives are still unfolding. By constructing a cabinet through photographic evidence and digital mounting, the work reframes the cabinet of curiosities as a site for non-extractive knowledge production — one that holds space for latency, legality, and ethical responsibility alongside wonder and inquiry.

Still Warm is part of Berry Sullivan's broader practice in speculative museology and durational archival work. berrysullivan.com