how is art about tech good for the planet?
Thoughts on why I have ended up destroying broken personal computers for art & how I see it helping the global ecosystem collapse.
Sounds absurd, but welcome to 2021.
All of my work is rooted in giving nature a voice: the work used to be smoothly curved objects made of wood in order to respect it (see photo below). You know the type: handmade minimalist geometries in quality wood with inspiration from modern masters like Barbara Hepsworth and Brancusi. Unfortunately that work wasn’t helping the environmental cause and I had to change direction.
The core problem with that vein of work was that it didn’t activate the viewer. As such, it didn’t challenge people’s thinking — in fact I would be surprised if it sparked new thoughts at all. From evolutionary psychology we know that soft shapes that mimic water, healthy natural materials and sensuously biomorphic curvatures attract us humans. These objects are blissful and our mind rests upon them. They are ”easy on the eye” and we take pleasure in gazing at them. This experience doesn’t prompt a reaction, but passifies.
Miniature of a droplet sculpture that I made into a larger version in 2017
The role of art is not simply to bring pleasure to the viewer, but also to produce new knowledge. Defining art is far beyond this text, but for context an artist who I have great respect for, Robert Irwin, has described art as:
”Art really in a sense is close to philosophy because it doesn’t have a function — in the critical sense that architecture does have.
Art is a continual inquiry into the potential of human beings to perceive and know the world with an aesthetic bias.”
iPhone 6 cast in aluminum reclining against granite
What kind of cultural expressions of our relationship with nature should be produced? The obvious answer is to create dreamscapes of nature’s triumph over the oppressive machine. These would represent how the organic forces take over technology that has colonized a previously perfect natural order. This trope of nature vs. technology is very popular in our culture and can be seen in instances like James Cameron’s Avatar & people’s obsession with the Chernobyl disaster.
The paradox with this divide is that nature and technology are not separate. We humans are animals and we eat, breathe and think as nature. Besides, you and I have never even seen the ideal, pristine and wild ”Nature” implied by the divide. Where humans have gone, we’ve cut trees, farmed and hunted for the last 5 000 years. In the process we have changed the Earth’s landscape, air and waters in such a way that today’s nature is entirely colonized already. Our plastic can be found in the deepest parts of the ocean and our forests are parks compared to the past. As for technology’s links to the natural environment, just think about where all the raw material comes from and who’s making the tech.
As an artist I’ve found the most juicy content to be between the two: what connects nature & technology?
How can it be so difficult to understand our connection to the land? How can we fix that? Afterall, if we humans are animals, then our houses are simply nests, right? That’s easy, but how to identify the great outdoors in stainless steel…? And how is my electric outlet part of all that muddy and leafy stuff happening outside?
left: Unfinished wooden sculpture
right: Bronze iPhone 3GS sculpture inside a glass display prototype
I believe that to a large extent the planetary crises (inc. climate change & 6th mass extinction etc.) is a conseqence of our disconnect from ”the means of production”. We no longer know what we are consuming or what resources are taken up by our choices. We all contribute daily to direct drivers of our own extinction through resource dynamics that are invisible and unimaginably complex.
These levels of complexity exhibit themselves as irrational detours of sustainability. To me in Finland, a red wine from Chile is supposedly ”more sustainable” than a French one. Though sent from the other side of the world, the Chilean was made in a facility using solar energy, they make bio-ethanol from the skins of the grapes, their vineyard incorporates permaculture and the bottle isn’t as heavy to ship as the French one. On the other hand, the lighter bottle is made of plastic, but then again it could be made of bio-plastic. So confusing, but this probably sounds very familiar.
Imagine a time when everything necessary for life was produced in your village. By a graspable community of interconnected people sourcing and making things for each other. If you needed a water jar, you knew it would require something like:
clay from person X
water from the village well
the potter’s time and skill
use of potter’s oven (made by person Y)
wood for the fire in the oven in order to harden the clay
glaze (salt, plant ash or other ceramic fluxing agent) to make the pot waterproof from person Z
Water jar with lugs, known as Tatsutagawa, 1500s-1600s AD, ceramic - Tokyo National Museum - Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan Creative Commons
In this tight-knit community of the village, it is atleast possible to imagine how resources and labor could be tracked and conserved. Protection of these elements was a matter of life and death to people who couldn’t just take a plane somewhere else or to just Wolt it to themselves. Or Foodora it. Or Uber Eats it.
Nowadays we just buy a water jug. We don’t know what we’re buying in the form of the process and the history of the object. Essentially this is a matter of ethical production and we do have a rising consciousness about child-labor, conflict minerals and coal-powered Bitcoin mines. Now imagine this issue with something like a Playstation 5. What are you actually consuming? What are the processes you are buying into through its 100’s of components? Starting on the surface, we know for sure that the cover’s ABS-plastic doesn’t grow on trees, neither is it found underground as such. Wikipedia to the rescue:
”ABS is a terpolymer made by polymerizing styrene and acrylonitrile in the presence of polybutadiene. The proportions can vary from 15% to 35% acrylonitrile, 5% to 30% butadiene and 40% to 60% styrene.”
So it’s made of chemical compounds cooked using chemical elements. The elements were isolated from sources mostly underground (rocks are made of minerals which are in turn made of chemical elements like f.ex. oxygen). Taken to this level, ABS is a natural product - its just ”natural resources”. Of course it is made of nature because we have nothing else around us to make things out of, but it is very far from it’s earthly ancestral materials. For this reason I very much disagree with the term ”natural resource” since there are no ”unnatural resources” and they are not a resource to begin with — nature just exists, it doesn’t exist FOR US to take.
As an artist I am free to tickle the audience’s brain with connections too vague & chains of associations too long for scientists or academia to present.
detail of ‘Mining Hot Potatoes’ (2021) featuring a briefcase made of Apple MacBooks packed with new potatoes
In my current studio production I am using objects that make ABS look like organic produce in comparison. I use personal computers and other hi-tech devices that are re-assembled and re-contextualized to represent the incredibly elaborate and alien distance between them and their earthly raw materials. It is an attempt to re-connect our information age to the underlying land. Educating about the resource-intensity of technology (like the villagers understood the ingredients of a water jar) can lead to an appreciation of existing things, which are taken better care of as a form of respect for what they are made of. Additionally, knowing more about the true cost of consumption raises healthy criticism towards what is necessary to buy or what kind of innovation is simply excessive use of resources for non-existing problems.
I am very excited to have this opportunity to explore a largely overlooked territory, but repeat: I would rather that I did not have to stop making beautiful wooden sculptures for pleasure. I would love to make them, but unlike in the early 1900s when Brancusi made art, we don’t have the luxury of time to recede into escapism and pleasure.
We must dig deep into our interconnected patterns of over-consumption, identify the drivers and change them in order to save what is left of our home.