How can we reinvest in what digital and electronic waste might be and do right now?

For Phonēy Prints I produce usable ink from ground up phones mixed with extender, and produce fine art prints on paper from my old t-shirts. Zoom in to any of the iconic phone imagery to see bits and details of crushed media.

Where might play and joy, humor and wonder, turn waste into potential? What else might this phone – any phone – be and do?

Phonēy Prints 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 or tiles, 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.

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.