I was invited to produce some context-specific Server Farms as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Durban, South Africa in June 2018. The trial run went beautifully, where I collected waste and plants regionally, and – along with my studio assistants, Jenna Marti, Olivia Overturf, and Samantha Tan – I workshopped the production of sculptures and installations with local and symposium participants.

Server Farms are, in their simplest form, computers and other technological equipment repurposed as planters. A gutted iMac, face up, where the screen and motherboard are replaced with wheat grass. A Dell filled with house plants, aloe sprawling from a tower, a mushroom and moss rooted in an Apple Watch. I root trees in laptops, grow molds and fungi in and around tablets, inject watches, phones, and cameras with spores and microscopic life – then let each flower, flourish, incubate, and spread.

What life may spur, how might techno-minerals diffuse?

Server Farms are part of The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures, a series and traveling exhibition of media sculptures that materially speculate on what our devices – phones and tablets, batteries and displays, etc – might become, over thousands or millions of years. Here 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 – and show them as photos, videos, and sculptural forms (Server Farms). utilities see e-waste used as a raw material, transformed into useful tools or ink, while Drivers stage all these works as mediagenic images. The exhibition also sees 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.