As I continue to read and think about our final project, I keep returning to the framing of computers as alien visitors, in particular the miniature computers we carry in our phones.
As the Earth-bound object that people hold to one’s ear, phones are by nature symbiotic. We expose ourselves to the phone by holding it up to our bodies. Exposed phones are sites of continual ambient data-gathering.
Unscrewing these phones reveals the plastic or metal frames of their skins, then the inside: silicon thinking agents created from precious metals and minerals.
These materials reveal a large chunk of the phone’s embodied geotrauma. The geographical origin and extraction method of the metals and minerals inside of the phone tell a story of violence and repossession.
A smartphone senses through its camera, its microphone, the accelerometer inside it, as well as touch and pressure on its screen. However, much of how the phone understands the world (and us) is completely opaque to us.
I wonder how we may use those same sensors to create interfaces that allow us to understand more about these alien creatures whose origins lie deep underground. How may we activate the geological and colonial histories embedded in the materiality of our phones? Is it possible to reverse engineer and remesh the mobile phone to create memorial places (places of memory)? In other words, sites for capturing and processing the range of geotrauma on the human body?
creative process journal 