WORKSHOP WITH DIGITAL ARTIST SHINJI TOYA Lives of Your Smartphones

This hands-on workshop uses a website-based version of Lives of Your Smartphones to contextualise the ecological issues of e-waste and planned obsolescence.

During the session, the participants will produce decaying versions of their smartphone handsets as png images to be uploaded online. The workshop contextualises the materiality of smartphones and their ecological implications to consider how the operation of the current mainstream technological development is harming the environment. The participants will collectively create a toolkit of alternative cosmological and cultural frameworks – this includes the poetic aesthetics of decay to counter the progress narrative of mainstream tech development and the cultural perception associated with Japanese animism and other ideas to think about alternative technologies with empathy and provision of de-anthropocentric views.

Participants are required to bring their smartphones.

The workshop has been developed with the support of Tanya Boyarkina (Compiler).