The Wall After Us is a site-conditioned installation – taking between 250 and up to 1500 square feet of space – exhibiting laptops, keyboards, tapes, drives, phones, circuits, and other electronic waste, intermingled with cables and plants, all clinging to and climbing up the walls to create an overwhelming and affective sense of what we use and throw out, what it might grow into, and how the Earth may (or may not) claim it. Several towers of e-waste, between 8 and 12 feet tall, come out and into the viewer’s space, off of the wall, implicating them, their media, and their bodies, in the ecologies at play in and around humans, nature, and politics, waste, media, and utility.

The Wall After Us is 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.

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.