Drivers is a series of staged photographs of some of the various objects produced for, or recycled as part of, the series and traveling exhibition, The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures. Here for example, I create media sculptures that materially speculate on what our devices – phones and tablets, batteries and displays, etc – might become, over thousands or millions of years. 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 (Phossils). I also turn “dead media” computers into efficient planters for edible goods, food for mold, or seeds of their own growth (Server Farms).

The objects created for The World After Us are extremely mediagenic, and are also often unsustainable (a mushroom and moss growing in an apple watch?), fragile (floppy discs and cassettes, charred in a thermochemical lab), dangerous (piles of capacitors and batteries which had to be carefully removed) and/or change greatly over time (plants growing out of phones, sometimes captured in natural habitats). Drivers, which range in sizes from 8×10 inches to 54×36 inches (depending on the individual print), capture some of the wonder my team and I felt in the studio, as photographic artworks that stand on their own.

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.

The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures will premiere at the Museum of Wisconsin Art | Downtown (MoWA | DTN) in the Saint Kate Arts Hotel in Milwaukee, WI, January 2020, and travel thereafter. It makes available a 200-page hardcover catalog, a short documentary, and an audio tour. It is generously supported by the UWM Office of Research.