Making and Breaking: Electronic Waste Recycling as Methodology

Abstract

This chapter proposes a practice-based methodology to investigate the materiality of electronic waste (e-waste), which formed the basis of the art-science research project Bodies of Planned Obsolescence: digital performance and the global politics of electronic waste. Building on anthropologist Tim Ingold's concept of 'making', a widened understanding of the term 'digital performance' informed shared practical activities of a group of scientists, cultural theorists, and artists. During two field-research workshops in Hong Kong and Lagos, Nigeria, researchers participated in e-waste recycling in a factory and on a dump site. Thus, in this form of practice-based research, the practical aspect of the research process does not concern the production of artworks, but instead involves shared participation in labour with materials. A process of shared reflection on this practical work may lead to outcomes in the form of new research avenues within the various disciplines of the participating researchers.

OB-scene, a Live Audio/Visual Performance for Photoplethysmograph and Female Body

“…Meireles’s work ‘Babel’ (2001) consists of analogue radios of varying ages, from large valve radios dating from the 1920s to the smaller cheap mass-produced electronic radios of more recent years (Tate 2018). The artist Dani Ploeger in the performance Waste Circuits (2013) used circuit boards from obsolete mobile phones that are melted down on a hot plate and then used to activate the performer’s muscles (Ploeger 2013).…”