Friday Update: Feedback Pls!!

I've been working in the past week and a half trying to engage with people who keep their tech around. And while the data I found supports that people just have gadgets lying around unused, its been hard for me to find people willing to engage with me. I've harassed everyone I know and posted on ten or so NYC forums/message boards/clist and most people either gave it away before downsizing to NYC apts, still feel like one day they're going to try and get the data/info off their tech so they keep it around or try and use it (a la Zach/Grace/Yoav), want me to pay them money for their old tech, the list goes on...

But what this has made me realize is: a) I'm not really a social scientist and b) why am I waiting around for other people when I am, in part, my audience. My thesis should be personal, like the Song Dong MOMA reference Ethan gave me. This last realization has been the most salient in the past week or so. This has led me to is to really understand what my thesis is:

Recall is a collection of works which explores the different levels of death in gadgetry and ways to cope with the loss in a manner that acknowledges the increasing human-like relationships we form with these gadgets. These works examine my process of memorializing my own collection of unused gadgets and exploring various ways to honor the relationship I had/have with each device.

Specifically, the pieces in Recall are (all titles are placeholders):

1) Death of an iPhone

Death of an iPhone is an exploration of the slow way that new technology melts from our consciousness once we leave what Ryan Block calls "the lust phase." In NYC, iPhone purchases have become so saturated that ATT cannot even keep up with the coverage. In the year and a half that I've owned mine, I've seen so many people with one that over time it's lost a bit of luster in my own eyes. Has this game-changing phone become so ubiquitous that it has melding in with its environment or is the interface and technology no longer novel enough to distinguish it? Death of an iPhone is a ceramic triptych that questions the presence of this gadget by using the metaphor of melting. Using a mold from my own iPhone, each piece in the triptych will show the phone in different states of presence.

2) Adopt this Mac

Adopt this Mac looks at what happens to older gadgets when we buy new one and questions whether or not we act in the gadgets best interests when the device has reached relative obsolescence. Since I purchased a newer computer in 2007, my old desktop has been used less and less to the point that it is no longer being used. Although the natural inclination is to sell such gadgets for money, why is it not to find a better home for it? When a baby outgrows its clothes, we pass them along to another family member; when we have to give up a pet, we find a loving family for it to go to. Adopt this Mac documents my process of finding a good home for my old computer regardless of price, instead putting emphasis on the people who will own this once cherished device.

3) Burial for My Cellphone

Burial for My Cellphone examines the ways in which we part with our cellphones when they have died on us. When we lose any loved one, we memorialize them in different manners: burying the family dog underneath his favorite oak tree or keeping ashes on the mantle. Since we have such constant physical contact with our cellphones, why don't we follow the same burial rituals we would when we mourn the loss of anyone else? After carrying my last cellphone for over three and a half years, it became an integral part in my life. Burial for My Cellphone documents the process of me making a ceramic sarcophagus for that phone and burying it in the city where I formed the relationship with it.

4) Numbers from a SIM Card

Numbers from a SIM Card explores the way that stored data on our gadgets acts as a time capsule for the period we used it and questions the permanence of that data once the technology is obsolete. There is a reason why the ancients wrote on scrolls and carved into tablets: to preserve the information for posterity and capture that moment in time. On a micro level, my old SIM card represents this same type of stored information of the people I was in touch with during the 5 year period I used that SIM card. Yet will a SIM card still be used into the future? Numbers from a SIM Card is a time capsule that is meant to be open in ten years. Its contents will contain the phone numbers written in physical form and stored on the SIM card.

-Jen