Re-sensing electronic waste through artistic practice, how can lived experience at e-waste recycling centers contribute to our media-ecological future?

This research project addresses the mediation processes that persistently hide the materiality of media technology. Media technologies contribute siginicantly to the current ecological crisis. Yet, ‘a pivotal feature of media technology’s is that their “materiality”, their material presence, and sensorial impact in the mediating process, tends to escape regular users’ (van den Oever and Fickers, 2023). As a result, the role that media technology plays in the current ecological crisis and the lived experiences of people working at the end of the production chain is often overlooked. If we want to grasp the human involvement and environmental harm that are consequences of the material that media equipment is made of, we must re-sensitize ourselves to the media technology we use so much.

Luuk intends to do this by making performative artistic interventions at an e-waste recycling centre in the Netherlands, a place where material, social, political, and aesthetic qualities of media technology are concentrated in a form that we ordinarily don’t encounter. As artistic methods these performative interventions can be a catalyst for making the materially informed experiences that live at the recycling centre visible. In doing so, his research aims to answer the following research question:

What kind of knowledge can be gained through a correspondence of my art practice with the hands-on practices of workers at recycling centres? And to what extend can this knowledge contribute to imaginaries on how media-ecological relations between humans and media technology could be otherwise?