Workshop with Shinji Toya: Lives of Your Smartphones

This hands-on workshop uses a website-based version of Lives of Your Smartphones to contextualise the ecological issues of e-waste and planned obsolescence. During the session, the participants will produce decaying versions of their smartphone handsets as png images to be uploaded online. The workshop contextualises the materiality of smartphones and their ecological implications, to consider how the operation of the current mainstream technological development is harming the environment. The participants will collectively create a toolkit of alternative cosmological and cultural frameworks - this includes the poetic aesthetics of decay to counter the progress narrative of mainstream tech development, and the cultural perception associated with Japanese animism and other ideas to think about alternative technologies with empathy and provision of de-anthropocentric views. Participants are required to bring their smartphone handset. The workshop has been developed by artist Shinji Toya with the support of artist and researcher Tanya Boyarkina. Shinji Toya (1984) is an artist from Japan, based in London (UK) for over 15 years. His practice is process-driven and uses computer programming, the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, participation, video, image manipulation and painting. Toya works in the domain of critical digital art and his work is based on the image-based visual art practice that utilises data and algorithms. The topics that his previous projects dealt with include the data economy of the post-digital era, digital memory, surveillance and the materiality of media. Tanya Boyarkina is a London-based artist, researcher, curator and cultural/digital producer aiming to demystify complex technological processes through playful, collaborative and participative formats. She has been working with museums, galleries, independent art institutions and diverse artists (emerging and established, local and international) for almost a decade, curating and producing online and real-life events which connect audiences of all ages and abilities with evolving digital cultures. Tanya’s current Critical Digital Learning research explores relationships between people, spaces, technical objects, digital logics and their cultural implications. Realising potentials for activism, decolonial practice, environmental debates and promoting inclusivity. Tanya is a co-founder of Compiler, a platform for digital art, curation, and critical technical practice addressing contemporary socio-political challenges.