Festival: Waste(d)! Art meets radical openness 2016.
During the Festival “Festival Waste(d)! Art meets radical openness 2016“ many artists dealing with E-Waste, software and other aspects of electronics from all over the world gathered, an exhibition took place in Linz.
The opening of this exhibition “Behind the smart world” in the KunstRaum Goethestrasse in Linz on May 25th was an interesting event, particularly for someone dealing with E-Waste.
Müller-Guttenbrunn had been visited by Andreas Zingerle and Linda Kronberg in the past and this formed the background against which the Müller-Guttenbrunn Group became material sponsor for this exhibition.
We were not aware that there is such an active international scene of artists that deal with the topic of E-Waste. Each of these artists has a completely different and artistic approach to the theme. There were artists from as far as Australia, China and Canada and the opening of the exhibition was visited by many interested people.
Some of the artists have an interest in the environmental aspects of the treatment of E-Waste in developing nations, others are interested in the data that is discarded with the E-Waste – and it was interesting to see how one artist identifies the previous owner of the hardware on the basis of the data found and returns the hard disk with the data back to the owner.
Some of the artists have an interest in the environmental aspects of the treatment of E-Waste in developing nations, others are interested in the data that is discarded with the E-Waste – and it was interesting to see how one artist identifies the previous owner of the hardware on the basis of the data found and returns the hard disk with the data back to the owner.
The artists organizing the exhibition Andreas Zingerle and Linda Kronberg visited one of the biggest e-waste dumps in the world, Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. There they acquired 22 hard drives, with which art-work has been created.
Other artists just do the opposite and create an artistic approach to erasing data. One of the examples is the art project “ne me quitte pas” of Audrey Samson from Montreal Canada and these data carriers end up in epoxy blocks (see picture).
Many of the projects consisted of installations involving video, photos, sound or combinations of those. The hardware that the Müller-Guttenbrunn Group supplied was turned into a wonderful E-Waste installation within this Exhibition.
We also supplied a poster that can be opened with this link.
