Cultural healing through computational crisis: disruption as a catalyst for alternate technologies

Our presentation will take the form of an interactive dialogue centred around the ramifications of electronic devices: tackled both from our Canadian (Cyrus Khalatbari) and Ghanaian (Akwasi Afrane) arts and design perspectives. Developed moreover as a conversational artist talk nuancing and questioning our mainstream ubiquitous narratives around digital (im)materiality, we will develop this contribution around our two intersecting research paths and inquiries that 1) shed light on the planetary toxicity and energy-crisis of the internet and 2) combine Afro-futurism with cultural healing through disruption. Our presentation will be centred around three sections; sections where we will expand on theoretical, methodological and design insights and rhizomes about our own practices and research. The first section will gravitate around the culturally-situated concept of “new” media; as the core model and injunction that underlies the lifecycle of electronic devices. Here, we will challenge the linear history of technology in order to recontextualise our current technologies as an assemblage of networks and infrastructures where both old and new intertwine. Our second section will expand from the use of science fiction inside our design practices : serving here as a catalyst to question, re-appropriate, disrupt and subvert our western “electronic-waste”(e-waste) narratives and discourses. Our third and final section will expand on two projects and design case studies that disrupt and challenge our normative views of technology: “iPhone/earth” (Khalatbari, 2023) and “TRONS” (Afrane, 2022). Drawing moreover from our previous sections, we will untangle how these projects, through their situated disruptions and re-appropriations of e-waste, draw from science-fiction in order to critically address through design the energy crisis and utopian/Afro-futuristic characteristics and potentials of alternative technology making and electronic waste.