April, 2019
9”x7”x4”
Tools serve as accretions of human memory. They externalize and objectify a function, allowing it to take life, solidify, and crystallize; they permit survival in defiance of the seasons, a sedentary lifestyle, and targeted destruction of other beings. This power[1] of tools, technology, and creation comes married to the curse of forgetting; if memory is embedded in an object or a process, it is lost to its user. They serve as prostheses, replacing the knowledge of the task they complete. This embedded memory stays with the machine, mutating and generating new possible uses for the tool, altering the way the user engages with the material world, and as such forming new and malleable prostheses.
digitalWrite(HIGH) is created with components of these prostheses as well as waste materials, the human byproducts of externalization of tool creation. The surface and material of the mask is injured, violating the integrity of the silicone and wounding the prosthetic itself. This wound positions itself between forgetting and remembering, remaining open where it is otherwise knit together by unseen scars, by technologic prosthetics. Electrical components, the guts and viscera of computational power, have been integrated into the inert silicone where they are completely unable to conduct any current. Camera flash bulbs have been set off through the mask via piercing wirework, destroying both in the process. These components do damage to both the prosthetic and the human. Many of the encompassed technological traces are also toxic to the human life they enrich, damaging organ systems and causing tumor generation and growth when they are a part of the tissue that reintegrates the extant and the forgotten.
digitalWrite(HIGH) is interlaced with components removed from circuit boards and other technologies both new and outdated, blurring the boundary between prosthetic growth and the semi-human. The coding used to set off the forty-year-old flash bulbs in sequence was pulled from the work of an engineering student, adapting an open-source electronics platform to be their command center, keeping the operator far from the sour smoke and burnt and shattered glass of the bulbs. This realignment was incompatible, and so each bulb was set off individually.
Some of the circuit board components are dangerous to human beings: the omnipresent lead solder from which they were removed can cause toxicity symptoms such as anemia, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal effects, renal disease, and irreversible neurological damage[2] in both those who work with it and those in the communities through which it permeates. Recently, lead has been notable for its contamination of water supplies in Flint, Michigan, the damage it caused to residents, and widespread inaction to mitigate or stop this damage. Mercury and hexavalent chromium[3] dwell in switches and relays, causing sense impairment and organ damage, while hypothyroidism-linked brominated flame retardants are an ingredient in the circuit board plastic pried apart and shredded to excise its hardware. PVC coating2 on the wire vasculature throughout the mask emits phthalates over time, labelled carcinogens and linked to kidney and liver damage. Though the physical action of these noxious constituents is less when contained and formed in this way as opposed to direct exposure (as when tearing apart a battery with pliers, for instance), they still act not only on those who work directly with their integration but also those who utilize the result of their summed parts, and even those who do not. Electronic waste permeates and contaminates ecosystems, altering human and non-human modes of existence along fault lines of social and economic power. Recently, circuit boards have been investigated[4] as a solution to the same problems they present - when ground into a powder, they can be used as an adsorbent to mop up toxic heavy metals in water, remnants of other industrial waste. In this they serve as a new prosthetic, altering the way users engage both with and through their tools.
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[1] Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Retrieved from http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2333 Y2
[2] Finch, C. (n.d.). The Toxic Components of Computers and Monitors. Retrieved April 20, 2019, from Small Business - Houston Chronicle website: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/toxic-components-computers-monitors-69693.html
[3] Hazardous chemicals in electronic devices. (n.d.). Retrieved May 25, 2019, from Greenpeace East Asia website: http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/campaigns/toxics/science/chemicals-electronics/
[4] Hadi, P., Barford, J., & McKay, G. (2013). Toxic Heavy Metal Capture Using a Novel Electronic Waste-Based Material—Mechanism, Modeling and Comparison. Environmental Science & Technology, 130719140359006. https://doi.org/10.1021/es4001664