Amazon Worker Cage Patent Drawing as Virtual King Island Brown Thornibill Cage
En el contexto de los nuevos avances tecnológicos que vuelven obsoletos los dispositivos casi tan pronto como alguien se acostumbra al último modelo, Simon Denny reflexiona sobre la producción, distribución y consumo de medios.

Hash2ash
Installation touches on the themes of selfie-culture, and the fear of permanently losing the digital records of our lives due to technical failures, impermanence of data storage, or simply because of the obsolescence of the old digital file formats. Even with such compulsive overproduction of the images of ourselves we might end up with nothing but the blank memories of our past. Even the data on ourselves will eventually fade away… The installation consist of the display that prompts you to take a selfie on your phone, which it renders in digital particles on its large 1×1 meter screen. Then a moment later, your face scatters and falls apart and the real black gravel starts to fall at the bottom of the screen in perfect synchrony with the digital simulation. Gradually a dark mound builds up at the foot of the construction.

NUFONIA MUST FALL
Kid Koala’s celebrated “live animated graphic novel”. Directed by oscar-nominated production designer K.K. Barrett (Her, Lost In Translation, Being John Malkovich). Performed, filmed, edited and scored in real time by a team of 15 performers including puppeteers, cinematographers, a string quartet and Kid Koala on piano/turntables. A romantic story about a robot on the verge of obsolescence.

via highlike submit
“While marketing drives demand and justifies the over-production of consumer electronics, I create sculptural landscapes and video installations from the circuit boards left behind in the wake of obsolescence. The majority of this material would be in landfills or contaminating our ecosystem from the recycling of precious metals and other natural resources.”

Canoe
The work here in Dawson is like an old vehicle in which I’ve put a new engine. Entitled Canoe, it consists of an approximately 20 foot long trough of water, that resembles some kind of boat. This provides a means for a gunwales tracking mechanism to slowly, endlessly paddle its way back and forth. It was first constructed in 2001 in a studio beside Halifax harbour. It draws visual inspiration from the bridges and water vessels of this port. Conceptually, it grew from an interest in technological obsolescence: how things (like canoes) make shifts from utility to leisure.
It has experienced several major rebuilds since 2001. Most of them have been practical, but for Dawson I’ve opted for an experimental configuration that changes significantly the nature of the work. Previously, Canoe has only ever been shown indoors. Normally in runs on rechargeable batteries, with a continuous, smooth motion. In Dawson, it is shown outdoors, alongside the Yukon river, showing up in an absurd way the paleness of its artificial river. Here, the primary source of power is sunlight.
Making use of the long northern day, solar panels receive light, storing energy in an array of super-capacitor cells. At this time, Canoe remains still. A custom circuit monitors the amount of charge, and when a predetermined trigger point is reached, it is dumped into Canoe’s electric motor in a burst, allowing it to make a few strokes. Then Canoe rests, while the charging cycle begins again. Motion is intermittent, entirely dependent on the amount and intensity of sunlight. It ranges from near standstill in overcast conditions to perhaps 1 or 2 strokes every minute in full light. The technical term for this type of circuit is a relaxation oscillator. I like this term because, if you remove it from its technical context, it points back to ideas about leisure and utility.

Binatone Galaxy

An installation for used cassette players which looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded as playback devices, they become instruments in their own right. Replacing the prerecorded content of each tape with a microphone gives us the chance to listen instead to the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells. Binatone Galaxy brings the framework within which a generation purchased their favourite records to the centre of attention, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the voices of the machines themselves.“On the walls of a white room, brightly illuminated with natural light, Stephen Cornford, and artist who describes his work as existing “at the intersection of sculpture and music”, has mounted some 30 old cassette recorders. Models from Boots, Sanyo, Robotic, one lone and gorgeously named Binatone Galaxy: they all hang on the walls, wired up, tapes loaded and ready for action. Smitten by an attack of technological melancholia, the visitor can wonder who owned these things, what pop charts did these machines once record? Were they ever placed next to pillows, late at night for surreptitious listening pleasures? What happened to the voices that once rubbed the magnetic heads of these little machines? For some artists, the speed (and resulting impact) of obsolescence on the technology we once took for granted has spawned a form of fetishism, in which the voices – the human agency – they once recorded exist in an alternate, ghostly dimension, a reminder of what once was. This is not Cornford’s theme. The fact that each audio cassette in his machines is fitted with a motion sensor and a contact mic, so that, on entry the machines whirr into action, indicates that Binatone Galaxy is very much of the here and now. Yes, Cornford has chosen old, cheap and accessible technology with which to realise this, but I suspect that he is aiming for a furrruuuzzy audio intimacy.

Vincent Lamouroux

Fasciné par la forme des montagnes russes et par le mouvement que cette structure permet d’effectuer, les oeuvres de François Lamouroux combinent architecture et sculpture. L’artiste tente, dans sa démarche, de modifier l’espace tant au niveau visuel qu’au niveau des sensations physiques. Les installations de l’artiste cernent les espaces de divertissement, les formes de la science-fiction et du progrès. Ses oeuvres tentent “de retranscrire formellement l’aspiration au mouvement et à la projection des structures futuristes, tout en soulignant leur prédestination à l’obsolescence”. L’artiste utilise des matériaux low-tech comme du bois, de l’acier ou des néons. Vincent Lamouroux est lauréat du prix Fondation d’entreprise Ricard et expose en 2007 à la galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois à Paris.