The World After Us

This series of new media sculptures materially speculate on what our devices – phones and tablets, batteries and displays, etc – might become, over thousands or millions of years. Through research, experimentation, and craft, our team has tried (and failed) to turn phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels – and plan to put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes. We attempt to mimic geological time, as pressure and heat – through chemical interactions or specialized machinery – on laptops and tablets, and will display where that potential lies, as petrified-like LCDs or mangled post-exploded batteries, on pedestals in a gallery. We turn “dead media” computers into efficient planters for edible goods, food for mold, or seeds of their own growth – and show both those experiments, and their results, as images, videos, and sculptural forms. We have also turned ground phones into usable supplies, for example color for ink and pulp for paper, and put these to use in these new forms, as fine art prints. It is impossible for humans to truly fathom our planet on an Earth scale, 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. At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a larger scale, are the (digital) relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, politics and commerce on the other