Title: Hardware Habitats.
Media: 35mm Slides from Digital Photographs.
Year: 2006.
Credits
Thank You: Tyra Bombetto-Dalgaard, Crissy Liu, David Lukowski, Scott Penkava, Birgit Rathsmann, Lorraine Rudin, Emma Spertus, Alyssa Tang.
Title: Hardware Habitats.
Media: 35mm Slides from Digital Photographs.
Year: 2006.
Thank You: Tyra Bombetto-Dalgaard, Crissy Liu, David Lukowski, Scott Penkava, Birgit Rathsmann, Lorraine Rudin, Emma Spertus, Alyssa Tang.
Hardware Habitats is an analog slide projection of a series of twelve digital photographs. They depict a lush, plastic tableau: scenery for an electrical tropics brimming with cords and widgets, hung with delicate, toxic tendrils, and shiny, non-biodegradable vines. Computer bugs are the only creatures surviving much less thriving in this imperishable hardware habitat. Only insect life adapts to fast-encroaching jungle circuits and silicone swamps.
Hardware Habitats evolved in tandem with a series of works in which I am exploring the figure of biological computer bugs as real, organic entities living, quite literally, in the information landscape. Feeding on the over-production of computer culture, biological computer bugs allow a concrete perspective on the materiality of media, affording a practical inroad into the media archaeology of computer culture. Focusing on hardware as habitat is a way to localize the seeming immateriality of global information networks.