Circuit Boardwalk is a site-specific, outdoor installation of over 200 square feet of circuit-backed concrete tiles. Each tile is made from 90% recycled materials; they vary in size to be 12×12, 12×6, or 6×6 inches, and all are 1.5 inches thick. It was commissioned by the Binghamton University Art Museum as a long-term, campus-based intervention outside Binghamton’s Engineering building. It coincides with my solo show, The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures, which traveled from the Museum of Wisconsin Art to Binghamton’s space in upstate New York.

Listen to the audio tour recording about this installation:

The World After Us exhibits media sculptures, photographs, installations, and prints that materially speculate on what else our devices – phones and tablets, batteries and displays, etc – might become, now, or over thousands or millions of years. utilities see e-waste used as a raw material, transformed into useful tools, or ink, or tiles. For Phossils, I attempt to mimic geological time, as pressure and heat, with earth and clay – through chemical interactions or specialized machinery – on laptops and tablets, then display where that potential lies, as petrified-like LCDs or mangled and melted electronics, on pedestals in a gallery, or  in beakers and tubes. For Server Farms, I turn “dead media” computers into efficient planters for edible goods, food for mold, or seeds of their own growth – and show them as photos, videos, and sculptural forms. And Drivers stage all these works as mediagenic images. The exhibition also has a 250-plus square foot, wall-based installation alongside three, greater than human-sized towers of piled-on electronics and plant life.

What will digital media be and do, after us?

It is impossible for humans to truly fathom our planet on its own terms and at its own size, or conversely from the perspective of bacteria. But we can feel such things, through art and storytelling – making our aesthetic encounters both conceptually and ethically vital toward new futures. The World After Us questions how we move, think, feel, and act with the Earth and its inhabitants, both living and otherwise. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a much larger scale, are the (digital) relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.

Circuit Boardwalk was produced in collaboration with Civil Engineering Professor, Dr. Konstantin Sobolev, between his lab and my studio at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Our assistants included, in alphabetical order: Meghan Berger, Laura Bogyay, Aparna Deshmukh, Mich Dillon, Behrooz Farahi, Paul George, Allie Getty, Reed Heintzkill, Garrett Kocourek, Ava Ladky, Madison Sveum, Mary Widener, Roy Wittenberg, and Filip Zemajtis.