Debris: The detritus of digital media technologies
Article No.: 90, Pages 1 - 4
Abstract
This paper describes the artwork Debris (2021) and examines the impact of consumer electronics and digital media as electronic waste (e-waste) in environmental pollution. E-waste is in part motivated by planned obsolescence, a model for designing consumer electronics and digital media technologies to shorten their functional time period. The materiality of digital media as e-waste is explored in the installation Debris by repurposing found e-waste in an assemblage of broken hardware together with sound and a browser-based game. The assemblage becomes an autonomous device that reacts to the environment's light intensity to generate noise. As part of the assemblage, the game visualises the exponential growth of e-waste where the player has to survive planned obsolescence. Debris aims to raise awareness of the aggravating effects of e-waste on the environment.
References
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Alan Kay. 1993. The Early History of Smalltalk. In HOPL-II. 4/93, MA, USA. See: http://gagne.homedns.org/∼tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html
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Jennifer Gabrys. 2013. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, USA.
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Herzt and Parikka relate the concept of planned obsolescence to Bernard London who proposed in 1932 as a possible solution to the Great Depression that “every product should be labeled with an expiration date and that the government should charge tax on products that were used past their determined lifespan.” See: Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka. 2012. Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method. In Leonardo, Vol. 45, No. 5, 424–430.
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The most recent version of the browser-based game Debris can be played online here: https://pedroferreira.net/debris
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Shoshana Zuboff defines “Surveillance Capitalism” as: “Surveillance capitalism claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as “machine intelligence,” and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.” See: Shoshana Zuboff. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, USA.
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Developed by Richard Stallman, GNU General Public License (GPL) guarantees users to run, study, share, and modify software. See: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
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Published In
October 2021
761 pages
ISBN:9781450384209
DOI:10.1145/3483529
Copyright © 2021 ACM.
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 20 February 2022
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- Short-paper
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- Refereed limited
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- FCT ? Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P.
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ARTECH 2021
ARTECH 2021: 10th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts
October 13 - 15, 2021
Aveiro, Portugal, Portugal
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Overall Acceptance Rate 128 of 238 submissions, 54%
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