I wouldn’t call myself very technical. Some things I can manage, but most of the time I lack both the patience and the eyesight for anything too intricate.

Still, I keep an eye on new technology – I even subscribe to a couple of podcasts and newsletters to stay somewhat up to date.

What really gets my curiosity humming, though, is old mechanical machinery. I can’t fully explain why, but there’s something deeply satisfying about how tangible and straightforward it is. A set of gears, a crank, a pulley – you see them move and immediately understand the principle. No black boxes, no hidden code, no mystery. Just thoughtful engineering, created with function first, yet somehow ending up beautiful all the same.

This photograph is from a wall in a restaurant in Zadar, Croatia, where we rented a small house by the sea for a month just after the peak of the pandemic had passed. The owner of the restaurant must have a similar “Machine Fetishism” as I do.

And maybe that’s it: while today’s tech is about speed, efficiency, and abstraction, archaic machines remind me that beauty can also be found in the worn, slow, simple, and sheer physical presence.