In this evocative piece, Ellen Järnefelt takes us on a journey through Finland’s online marketplaces where dragon lamps, raw wool, and forgotten tools become windows into strange and intimate worlds. Through these digitally encountered artefacts, she explores how online browsing becomes a form of travel—shifting our perceptions of space, time, and the deeply human stories objects carry.

I moved into a new apartment a couple of months ago. I have since been engaged in an ambient search for some exciting artefacts and pieces of furniture from online marketplaces like the Finnish Tori.fi. To name a few highlights, I have so far encountered a human-sized dragon lamp (the dragon was clinging onto a torch-shaped light source), various assortments (and sizes) of elves, 80kgs of raw wool pictured on a barn floor and some very large swords. I’ve developed an odd relationship to these marketplaces, and with this Tori.fi in particular: scanning through these seemingly incoherent carousels of stuff seems to come very close to both roaming Google Earth and watching Big Brother. I am travelling through what seems to be an infinite area, yet simultaneously getting very very close; almost uncomfortably close.

The information networks of these human-to-human marketplaces allow me to encounter artefacts that wouldn’t have been discoverable through physical circulation only. In real-world settings, the likelihood of coming across a specific object is shaped by my routines, intentions and environmental structures; by an array of deeply entrenched trails that keep me in my material orbit. Artefacts are parts of realities, and much like planets, they often remain within their gravitational pull.

These objects and their online presentations are metonymies for their surroundings. Through images, design choices or the conditions of the listings, the artefacts I encounter carry degrees of internal specificity that indirectly reveal their existential context. Outdated tools describe patinated tasks, and obsolete merchandise from old campaigns or events articulate a tangible, analog history outside of the virtual world’s data pulls. Scuffs reveal ranges of motion and stains show tolerance; items in the background map political stances and socio-cultural identities. The object and its contextual framing become indexes of unfamiliar systems through the editorial narration of chance and some truly, madly, deeply human-generated content.

While remote, these encounters seem to interfere with the wheels of space-time or with what we deem (or imagine) as determinism. All encounters change my direction, at least incrementally. After seeing the dragon lamp, my world was slightly altered as I was brought to a concrete realization that the other end of the lamp spectrum was not a kitsch baroque chandelier but a human-sized dragon lamp with a 190-cm-tall torch. Spaces around me started to look a bit different: these intimate peeks into the unknown have influence that extends into the real world and its psycho-somatic circulation.

These virtual encounters with peculiar artefacts grant microcosmic access into small but coherent realities. The mode of exposure alters the relation between distance and access, and the result is a subtle uncoupling of experience from material sequence: it’s travel by proxy.

Learn more about Ellen: @ellen.jarnefelt