Lives Of Your Smartphones – Workshop

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. The workshop and its development have been supported by Arts Council England through the grant Developing Your Creative Practice.

Participants are required to bring their smartphone.

The workshop has been developed by artist Shinji Toya with the support of artist and researcher Tanya Boyarkina, and is supported by Arts Council England through the grant Developing Your Creative Practice. Image-processing tools that will be used during the workshop have been developed by Machine Learning engineer Ashwin D’Cruz. Ashwin also supported the development of Lives of Your Smartphones.

Event link here