E-Waste by Katherine Behar

Exhibition: Saturday November 7th - Sunday December 20th

Katherine Behar’s installation centers on a series of sculptures inspired by a science fiction scenario in which commonplace USB peripherals are doomed to continue working long after the humans they were designed to serve have gone extinct. The gadgets are transformed into mutant fossils, encased in stone with lights blinking, speakers chirping, and fans spinning, eternally. The exhibition also includes a video series, Modeling Big Data – in which the artist inhabits an obese, over-grown data body, to humorous and poignant effect, and a 3D printer installation, 3D-&& – in which a fossilized printer slowly produces “scarab” covers for a network of glowing USB mouses, while its motors chirp out messages in Morse Code.

Responding to digital culture’s intense escalation of productivity, Behar’s work wavers between poetry and parody. Eliciting sympathy for the devices we exploit, she suggests that we ourselves are becoming increasingly device-like. We are ensnared in compulsory productivity, whether “working” in the traditional sense for our own gain, or generating value for distant corporations each time we click “like.” Combining machine-made, handmade, and organic forms, E-Waste offers a physical parallel to the excesses of big data, highlighting the counterpart surplus of consumer media artifacts, and drawing attention to its environmental impact.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

As an interdisciplinary artist, Behar has worked in several mediums including performance, interactive installation, video and writing about digital culture. Her work appears at festivals, galleries, performance spaces and art centers worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Judson Church in New York; UNOACTU in Dresden, Germany; The Girls Club Collection in Miami; Feldman Gallery + Project Space in Portland, Oregon; De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam; the Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland; the Chicago Cultural Center; the Swiss Institute in Rome; the National Museum of Art in Cluj-Napoca, Romania; and many others.

Katherine Behar is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Art Journal and the Rubin Museum of Art and grants including the Franklin Furnace Fund; the U.S. Consulate in Leipzig, Germany; the Illinois Arts Council; and the Cleveland Performance Art Festival. Her ongoing projects include two collaborations, the performance art group Disorientalism with Marianne M. Kim, and the art and technology team Resynplement with Ben Chang and Silvia Ruzanka. Behar’s writings on technology and culture have been published in Lateral, Media-N, Parsons Journal for Information Mapping, Visual Communication Quarterly and EXTENSIONS: The Online Journal for Embodied Technology. She is currently assistant professor of new media arts at Baruch College.