in collaboration with Andrea Lim, Benjamin Forster, and Emily Stewart
A single white, scratched-surface table, sedimented with layers of use; five black, carpet-burn office chairs that prickle in the heat; a pristine set of stainless steel kitchen trays and bowls; and a large cardboard box erupting with rat king cables, dead laptops, hard drives, speakers, calculators, and obsolete phones. Decades of digital wreckage.
An email had been sent: an invitation to fall apart. Lamps are lit; twangy music plays quietly between friends. Tea is made and tools laid out with precision. Five people sit: a software engineer, a poet, a sound artist and two artist-hosts. We each choose an object from the box.
– They really don't want you to get in there
– – They don't want you to see the horror of the hollow
Run your fingertips along an edge
one smooth frictionless motion
An ex
–change
scattering DNA
excite electron crackles
{There may be blood.}1
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We delight in disassembly: breaking the spell of the whole; fathoming parts; careful handling. The production line is reversed. We find ourselves forming new attachments to the defunct, assigning value to multiplying pieces. We share methods for un-making; we ask for help from more hands. Fragments are held up to the light:
– What even is this?
– – It looks like a nipple
– – – It feels so invasive to be doing this
A polished mirror surface is lifted from its (en)crypt. These pieces have performed precisely, unseen and untouched by human hands until now. And now, we cannot avoid our own reflections.
Jellyfish hovering in a field
Feel your body as formless, protozoic
Entangled with other bodies
Your only solid state is liquid.2
We are destroying objects that, for years, existed under the swipe of fingers, in the warmth of pockets, gathering dust from bodies. Delegated memory-keepers and externalised executive function. We try to mouth the words for this lossy feeling but only come, palms upturned, cupping a frictionless wheel to spin out across time.3
– If you don’t turn on a laptop, the data fades over time… the electrical charge dissipates, then it’s gone
– – It’s like, alive, and then it’s dead?
– – – If a computer is a body, I don’t know where the vital organs are
Consider how this device held space
On a shelf, or carried close
Cradle the emptiness
Imagine this space inside you that need not be filled.4
It’s hard to name what we have found. Or what has been erased, even as our DNA stickily binds with each machined surface. We become aware of a one-way trajectory of incremental loss. It’s a loss not just of data, but of function, memory, connection, depth: our digital selves.
– Where does data go when it gets erased?
– – Traces of it remain, right?
– – – Like ghosts
– ...I think I have some of your dad’s hair
Discussion slows as we continue to break down, dissect. The mood spins from nostalgia to melancholy: though these things have lain untouched for years, we are relinquishing the latent hope that their contents could be reclaimed. These parts remain invisibly — hopelessly — inscribed with images, lost labour, and intimacies between people. We are feeling the forgetting, a sense of bleak responsibility. Potential evaporates, the ghosts vanish.
– Is it a form of love to take it all apart?
– – There’s some kind of energy, right? You feel like you’re fixing something even though you’re breaking it down
We speculate that the action of taking apart might teach us how to live with less, to go without, or at least how to slow this soft burial. It can also feel like honouring each device, this work of finding our way back to holding our own histories, memories, and stuff. We search for futures in our debris; for new beginnings in the dissolution.
Tap out a rhythm with your foot
1, 2 1, 2 1, 2 1, 2
Tinnitus echoes
Brains, mothers, boards
backflipping against time.5
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– I think I can’t make mine into smaller pieces. I don’t know how
We have been murmuring together for hours, completely absorbed in the un-making. Language stutters and glitches and fails in the unknown; speculation fires our collective imaginings. There is still more wonder… haptic button-bounce nostalgia. World’s first fidget spinner. Magnets holding action in suspension. The braille score of a soldered motherboard. Searching for the atom, dragging fingers through trays of impossibly tiny screws.
We have to tear ourselves away.
Green light, dark. Green light
Pass a hand across your field of vision
Drip drip dripping
hot solder on your fluttering eyelids.6
– I’m sad about destroying a beautiful thing
– – But did you think it was beautiful before you took it apart?
The lossiness is not just the data dissolving; we feel it in our bodies. We are undone by it.
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[1.] Toshiba laptop (Model: Satellite L750. Year: 2011). Part: CD disk drive drawer track.
[2.] Toshiba laptop (Model: Satellite L750. Year: 2011). Part: CD disk laser reader.
[3.] Lossy compression is a process by which data is discarded to reduce file size. This process is irreversible: this lost data can never be restored.
[4.] Toshiba laptop (Model: Satellite L750. Year: 2011). Part: CD disk drive.
[5.] TDK iSLIM iPod Speaker Dock (Model: ADS-02. Year: 2007). Part: motherboard.
[6.] Ibid.
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