Content type: Photo Essay
Credits: Jennifer Gabrys (Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge) and Thresholds Journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture
Year: 2006
Introduction:
In this photo essay, Jennifer Gabrys explores her fascination with environments, material processes, communication technologies and how they intersect. For this project, Gabrys travelled to Silicon Valley to explore and document the waste landscapes of computers and computing in-situ. Through this field-research, Gabrys found that there were many categories of waste present that are not usually associated with computing or digital technologies—ranging from packaging boxes to abandoned buildings—and that obsolescence in technological waste manifests materially, tangibly and destructively.
‘This photo essay maps those spaces where waste, decay and other orders of materiality that have yet to enter the sense of the digital [...] they suggest that computing may be a system that is deeply implicated with forms of ephemerality that extend far beyond technical obsolescence.’
The images below were originally published in Thresholds Journal 31: Ephemera produced by the MIT Department of Architecture in 2006. Find the original PDF here.
