e-waste performance

Text: Dani Ploeger, photos: Alexia Manzano

In January and February 2017, we visited Nairobi to present the outcomes of the Bodies of Planned Obsolescence workshops we did in Nigeria, Hong Kong and the UK in 2015. In addition to showing our previous work, we visited electronics retail sites in Nairobi and elsewhere in Kenya to buy a collection of new USB cables as part of an exploration for a new direction within the project. The group of participants included Catherine Chapman (journalist), Chris Williams (international relations scholar), Greenman Muleh Mbilleh (artist), Joan Otieno (artist), Dani Ploeger (artist), Brigitte Mutengwa (anthropologist), Hannah Whittaker (project coordinator), and Alexia Manzano (photographer).

Until this latest journey, the project’s engagement with e-waste had mainly focused on the export of – often still working – second-hand devices from the Global North to the Global South. These devices usually remain technically functional for many years after the original owner discarded them. After having been used by their new owners for a period of time, these devices then eventually end up on e-waste dumps. It is these devices that we engaged with in our workshops in Lagos and Hong Kong.

However, already during our stay in Lagos in early 2015, we became aware of a development in global electronics consumption that has thus far hardly been addressed. After I lost my smartphone in a car robbery, I went out to buy a basic replacement phone (see the blogpost below). To my surprise, a brand-new Nokia brick phone, directly imported from East-Asia, was much cheaper than a similar secondhand model imported from Europe; the ‘original’ model from 15 years ago was considered better quality than the new product.

Especially in sub-Saharan Africa, an increasing amount of e-waste is now generated by low-grade new electronic devices and peripherals (mobile phones, data cables, battery packs etc.). These new devices, which are imported directly from China, Malaysia and other producing countries in East-Asia, often break shortly after purchase and are usually instantly discarded. This trend is also becoming apparent in Europe, where discount retailers like Poundland (UK) and Action (NL) are offering an increasing assortment of peripherals of equally low durability. Thus, a change in the dynamics of global trade in new and used electronics is taking place.

Several questions arise from this development:

-Consumer technologies such as computers and mobile phones have long served as symbolic objects in visions of the ‘new’ and the futuristic. How does the current drive towards conspicuous disposability and transitoriness of these objects affect this symbolic trope?

-The availability of directly imported low-cost new electronics means that Europe and North-America’s role in the supply of consumer technology to Sub-Saharan Africa is declining. In what ways might this development relate to China’s expansion of its geopolitical interests in sub-Saharan Africa in a broader sense (large scale investments in infrastructure, energy supply and raw material mining)?

-How can the degree to which various markets (ranging from the urban to the rural and the pastoral) are penetrated by specific electronic devices (e.g. mobile phones and its peripherals) be read as a degree of connection to and participation in globalized culture?

A consideration of electronics consumption in Kenya is of interest to these questions: the country encompasses a particularly broad range of electronics retail and use practices, ranging from westernized urban mall culture, to pastoral communities where electronics play a very different role. Street vendors and small scale shops are omnipresent in Kenya. Their form of trade seems especially compatible with the dissemination of these cheap, new electronic devices and peripherals. The speed and informal nature of the transactions in public space make it a typical environment for the impulsive purchase of products without long term-use perspectives.

During our visit to Kenya, we decided to examine the rise of low-grade new electronics by tracing the way in which one specific common and cheap electronics accessory – the micro USB charging cable – is represented and sold in a broad range of geographical and cultural environments across the country. We explored the trading sites where we found the various cables through a psychogeographical approach. In his article, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (1955), Guy Debord describes psychogeography as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’ In such study of the environment, the method of the ‘dérive’, or ‘drift’, takes a central place. Debord describes this as ‘a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.’

In each site we visited, participants conducted several dérives. Throughout these drifts (individually or in pairs) through the retail environment the participants purchased cables and used writing, photography and sound recording to document their environments in terms of their social, geographical, economic, and aesthetic dimensions. In addition, photographer Alexia Manzano created visual overviews of the general environments of the dérives, while also acting as a paparazzi of sorts, taking distant shots of participants with a zoom lens while they were exploring the environments. The resulting set of data from our explorations includes the following:

-a collection of physical cables

-a series of white box studio photographs of these cables

-individual participant documentation of the environments in which the cables were collected (including text, snapshot photos and sound recordings)

-photographic overviews of the various sites

-photos of the participants interacting with their surroundings during their explorations

Through this combination of documentation in different media and with different scopes the project builds on the acknowledgement that the electronic commodities we investigated do not exist as autonomous objects, but are embedded in a network of stories, expectations and practices. Importantly, the buyer also plays an important role in this network. Thus, the project participants are also implicated as research subjects themselves. While performing their explorations, they operate – and are perceived – in a certain relation to the commodities they buy, based on (assumptions about) their background in terms of class, gender and race. Hence, part of the documentation is focused on showing how participants navigate and interact with the various retail environments.

An evaluation of some of our findings in relation to this, as well as a reflection on the potential and limitations of the project’s methodology will follow soon. For now, here is a selection of photos and participant notes from five of the sites we visited:

Gaikindo Market, Nyeri County (regional rural market)

Greenman: ‘My phone is a fake Sony. I asked Jimmy from Jimmy’s Enterprises if he has an original USB cable for my phone. The cable he sold me malfunctions. Charging is frequently interrupted’.

Joan Otieno: ‘Salesman Karioki was not aware that he had a USB cable in his assortment. He didn’t recommend the one he had: “Please don’t buy it, it’s fake! There’s another shop that sells originals. You have money, so you can afford an original one.”’

Gakindu, Nyeri County (settlement, 5km from Gaikindo)

Dani Ploeger: ‘We found no USB cables. Kids offered to go home and look for some for us to buy from their families. Here, only the sheep had cables.’

Westgate Shopping Mall, Westlands, Nairobi (upmarket shopping centre)

Joan Otieno: ‘I perceived this as a place where only the rich go. I didn’t interact with people and only saw prices at a distance. The cables were very expensive. On the way to the toilet I spoke with a security guard. “Do you just want to have a look or do you want to buy?”, he asked. I felt bad about going to shops without buying anything.’

Dani Ploeger: ‘Several of the cables I saw here are advertised with a focus on their innovative characteristics. The promoted features often seem absurd, e.g. the cable doesn’t tangle cos it’s very short.’

Luthuli Avenue, Central Business District, Nairobi (electronics wholesale area)

Catherine Chapman: ‘There are many wholesalers here and nobody seems to know what’s going on. There is no control of products coming in and going out and traders seem to have little to no knowledge of the products they are selling.’

Chris Williams: ‘I was looking for a mini USB lead for my somewhat older phone. I didn’t find any and nobody I met had an understanding of cable types. They were just sales people.’

Nyayo Market, Ngara, Nairobi (secondhand market close to the city centre)

Greenman: ‘I overheard the traders speaking among each other: “Did you have the whites in your shop? They look like money”. They asked me: “are you buying this for yourself or for them?” I was perceived as part of a group of foreigners, rather than a local individual visiting the market.’

Chris Williams: ‘I felt that the atmosphere on the market was relaxed. I spoke with a trader who appreciated secondhand products: “old is gold”’.

text: Dani Ploeger, photos: Peter Dammann and Dani Ploeger

Since the start of the Bodies of Planned Obsolescence project, back in 2014, a Samsung smartphone has accompanied me. Over the past three years the phone’s history has become intertwined with the project, and has reflected and informed our engagement with electronics consumption and waste in various ways.

In 2015, I lose my Samsung S3 in a robbery on our first trip to Lagos. Some guys bash in the windows of our car while we are stuck in traffic and grab the bag with my phone. The next day, I decide to go to one of the small telephone stalls on the market to buy a basic, ‘dumb’ phone, to get by until I get a new smartphone. The vendor offers me a brand-new Nokia N103 for 2000 Naira – about 6 Euro – but my eye falls on an old Nokia 3310 that she has on display as well. ‘That one is 8000 Naira’, the lady declares. Convinced that she is trying to take advantage of my probably rather obvious nostalgic excitement about the old phone, I try to bargain, arguing that the ugly old phone can’t possibly be more expensive than the new one she offered me at first. But she insists, stating that my phone of choice is ‘an original Nokia’ and therefore more valuable. Determined not to be fooled like that, I buy the new one.

Later that day, I make my first call. I can hardly hear the voice on the other end and notice that shaking the device causes a dangling sound of what seem to be some loose-hanging parts inside. The half-responsive keyboard and dreadful processing speed make the device equally unsuitable for text messaging. In the end, the effective functionality of the ‘phone’ turns out to be pretty much limited to its flashlight function. Later I realize that this was a first sign of the development in global electronics trade that has been the focus of recent project visits to Kenya. In sub-Saharan Africa, cheap new devices, directly imported from Asia, appear to be gradually replacing secondhand electronics from Europe. Until recently, secondhand devices were usually preferred over low quality new gadgets, as my experience in Lagos showed, but secondhand phones are now gradually becoming non-existent on markets across sub-Saharan Africa. 

On our trip to Hong Kong, two months later, I replace the dodgy Nokia with a used smartphone, a Samsung S3 just like the one I lost in the robbery. I find it at the secondhand electronics market in Sham Shui Po, during our evening exploration of the area as part of the project. In a back alley of the market we meet a Nigerian trader who tells us that he exports second hand electronics from Hong Kong to Lagos and makes good profit because the demand for second hand goods is much higher in Nigeria. So, the S3 I bought could actually have become one of those expensive ‘original’ phones in Lagos.

Although my current S3 is my second, it feels to me as if I have had the same one since 2013. Even though the actual object has been exchanged in between, I don’t have the experience that anything has changed. My phone may play a central role in my day to day life, but I haven’t actually added any personalized features to its physical presence. The mass-produced nature of both the phone itself and its protective cover make it entirely exchangeable. The logic of both production and use seem to negate it as an individual material object. This has become one of my central concerns in the project: in all sorts of ways consumer technologies seem to drift towards a condition in which their materiality becomes backgrounded in everyday experience (I wrote more about this here)

In 2016, my Hong Kong S3 slowly starts to deteriorate. It switches off at random moments more and more frequently. After the initial remedy I found on an internet forum (hitting the power button on the edge of a table) no longer works I take it to a repair shop in my hometown in the Netherlands. The consultation is brief and straightforward: “You need a new LCD screen, which costs more than your phone is worth.” In other words: total loss. When I visit Njeru and Alphonsol’s repair shop in Nairobi a few weeks later, I decide to give the phone one last chance though. After taking it apart and looking at it for a few minutes, Alphonsol comes to the same conclusion as my repair guy back home: it’s not worth trying to repair it. He starts putting the parts back together, but he takes his time. It looks like he mixed up the parts of my phone with the S3 from the shop which he uses for reference. After 20 minutes, when he still seems to be messing around with the various parts of the two phones I get a bit annoyed and ask him what the problem is. Why can’t he manage to put my phone back together? Considering that the device is pretty much a total loss I suggest that he could just hand it back to me in parts if it is so difficult to put everything back properly. He ignores me and continues his business. Another five minutes later, he hands the phone over to me. “It works.”, he says with a smile. When I ask him what his trouble shooting method was and how he managed to fix it he replies: “Sometimes showing a bit of patience pays off”. I still don’t quite understand what Alphonsol did, but I guess this was an encounter with one of the secrets of the flourishing electronics repair culture in Nairobi, which the project tried to grasp during the event at the Victoria & Albert Museum in March 2016 as part of Utopia 500.

In November 2016, Chris Williams and Dani Ploeger travelled to Nairobi, Kenya, to present the Bodies of Planned Obsolescence project to academics, policy-makers and street vendor representatives at the International Conference on Urbanization and Street Vendors, organized by the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA). As part of the trip we also collaborated with French geographer Sylvain Racaud (deputy director of IFRA) and Kenyan artist Greenman Muleh Mbillo to consider our earlier work in Nigeria, Hong Kong and the UK in the context of current developments in consumer electronics trade and use in Kenya. In particular, we focused on the recent increase in low-grade new electronic devices and peripherals, which are directly imported from East-Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. In this context, we undertook several individual explorations of street vending sites in the centre of Kisumu, Kenya’s third biggest city, located at Lake Victoria in the North-West of the country. While wandering around the centre of the town we looked at different ways in which cheap digital commodities and their peripherals are represented and used.

Dani Ploeger – EXTENSION

Three new power strips, purchased in Nairobi and Kisumu: “BEST-ASTRA-ENGLAND”, “Apple”, “Switch to Wood”. Despite their usually inconspicuous domestic presence - tucked away on the floor or behind furniture - power strips are symbolic objects, mediating local, globalized and post-colonial technological imaginaries and practices.

Chris Williams – Discreet e-Vending

New electronic media facilitates the trading of goods and services that people may not want to buy openly – incontinence pads, sex, Viagra, contraceptives, wives, medication, pornography. In Nairobi, street-posters with mobile phone numbers create novel forms of discreet street e-vending, accessing the services of the Mganga healers, for example. In London, the internet facilitates discreet e-vending, similarly. On Google, adding the prefix ‘London’ to the keywords used by the Mganga healers finds many similarities. (e.g. ‘London love potion’). The global electronic “solutions” services solve universal human problems.

Greenman Muleh Mbillo – White and Yellow Carpet: A monument to fantasy. Mother of all Vendors

Discarded packaging material from electronic devices and obsolete CDs are painted with words and names referring to spiritual and intellectual concepts.

In June 2016, Dani Ploeger and the London-based Restart Project collaborated as part of the Utopia 500 Festival at Somerset House in London. The Restart Project held a three-day-long repair event in the courtyard of Somerset House where people were invited to bring their broken devices to repair these with assistance from Restart members. In response to the issues of electronics durability, materiality and waste, which are at the core of The Restart Project’s work, Dani Ploeger made a ‘utopian gadget’ consisting of a ‘bricked’ smartphone, cast into a brick-shaped concrete block.

e-Repair culture in Kenya

This Friday, 15 April, we’re organizing a public workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that combines digital art, hands-on electronics repair, and an exchange with electronics repairers in Nairobi, Kenya. The event is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connected Communities Festival 2016.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/digital-futures-dreaming-zero-waste-tickets-24331759949

Alphonsol Joseph and Njeru Mugai will be at the V&A Museum. Via a live video stream from their mobile phone repair shop in Nairobi. We'll talk about taking apart electronic devices, throwing things away, and other things.

Watermans Gallery, London, 4-25 July 2015

An exhibition of initial project outcomes: photo, video, and sound documentation; collaboratively produced texts, artefacts, and performances

Photos: Neil Maycroft

Throughout the year-long duration of this first part of the project, participants exchanged reflections and ideas in response to their participation in e-waste recycling work in Lagos and Hong Kong. On 29 and 30 June 2015, they developed a collaborative exhibition, based on a set of shared interests that emerged from the workshops:

-Social bodies and global networks

-Tools as traces of materials and bodies

-Perceptible dust vs. invisible circuits and toxins

-Cyborgs and garbage

-Electronics and the performance of cleanliness

(the works below that are not attributed to a single person are outcomes of the collaborative work during the workshop)

E-waste Disassembly Tools and Sounds

Hammer from Alaba market e-waste dump in Lagos. Pneumatic screwdriver from Vannex International Ltd. recycling factory in Hong Kong. Soundscape recordings from the Lagos and Hong Kong recycling sites.

- tools as traces of encounters between bodies and the debris of techno consumer culture

- tools and their connection to local practices, specific social and geographic locations

Packs of Lives

Butchered body/machine parts have been packaged for sale, sealed and marked with ‘use by’ dates, ready for export. Destination unknown.

Jelili Atiku - Capacitance Does Not Consume Power (2015; performance documentation)

E-waste scavengers in Lagos use a shaker tool made of an old screwdriver and spindle platters from DVD players to attract people's attention.

Dust-off

The fan of a motherboard switches on and off intermittently. It blows household dust, removed from the inside of a computer carcass, into the air. The continual movement of dust is contained in the piece. However, the ceaseless creation and motion of unconfined dust accompanies all stages of the e-waste journey.

Dust has pervaded this project, in many and unexpected ways. We have been covered in dust, breathed dust, and been infected by dust. Dust has been a surprising and provocative companion.

Our first encounter with ‘fresh’ e-waste, at the V&A, was disappointing due to the absence of dust covering the freshly disposed carcasses. Also a surprise was the amount of dust we found inside the discarded computers we dismantled in Hong Kong. These machines suck in dust in startling quantities. The dust, both present and absent, in these two cases was very much the familiar dust of everyday domestic life; the stuff we find clinging to our furniture and filling our vacuum cleaners. It is the organic dust of human skin debris, pet hairs and dust mites; a fertile, rich medium.

The other types of dust we have encountered have been much more dangerous. This has reminded us that dust is not a stuff but a category. What comprises specific dusts varies with the activities and locations where we find e-waste processing. Inorganic dusts comprising heavy metals, and other toxic and indigestible fragments, poison and infect people, animals, and the land itself. Most startling was the dense layer, thick as fur, of metal and plastic dust that coats the machinery at high-tech recycling factories.

These different varieties of dust extract various kinds of revenge; familiar, organic dust clogs the machine, accelerating its journey to obsolescence, while the dangerous dust of e-waste processing retaliates against both individual bodies and the social body whose hubris set the whole process in motion. A measure of dust for a measure of dust. - Neil Maycroft

ELECTRONIC 506 (garbage cyborg)

'A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism' (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985)

Household dust is composed of 70%-90% human skin flakes (Clark and Cox, 'The Generation of Aerosols from the Human Body', 1973)

Shu Lea Cheang – Spoken (2015) Piles of old speakers with old screws attached. The magnetic fatal attraction of by-gone technology. Some speakers stripped naked still sound deep, droning and drowning. Metals composted give way to the worm colony. Sprouts awakened. Technologies don’t die easy, strive for after life beyond expiration day, claim its own salvation as ever stretching cellular organism.

Dani Ploeger – E-waste Wound (2015)

The morning after I participated in e-waste recycling labour on the dump site in Lagos, Nigeria, a sore patch appeared on my left arm. It got infected. E-waste performed on my body.

Unrealized Heavy Metal Analysis

Three laboratory containers with e-waste samples from Lagos, Hong Kong and Sittingbourne. Poster of previous toxicological analysis by Kehinde Olubanjo.

Photo documentation by Peter Dammann

text: Dani Ploeger, photos: Neil Maycroft

In the beginning of July we installed our group exhibition at the Watermans Centre in London, which ran from 5-25 July. After a week of sharing ideas and reflections on the workshops in Lagos and Hong Kong, a group of project participants including Shu Lea Cheang, Neil Maycroft, Kehinde Olubanjo, Irini Papadimitriou, Chris Williams and myself collaborated on the creation of a number of short texts and artifacts. These formed the heart of a show that intertwined artwork with critical theory and reflections on methodology in science. The workshop week started with a group visit to the SWEEEP Kuusakoski plant in Sittingbourne, Britain's foremost e-waste recycling facility, which claims to retrieve close to 100% of materials. We were accompanied by artists Susana Sanroman and Maria Jose Arceo, who have made work on the premises of SWEEEP before. Unlike our visits to Alaba Market in Lagos and the Vannex factory in Hong Kong, we did not participate in the recycling work in Sittingbourne; health & safety concerns and regulations make such endeavours much more difficult if not impossible to arrange in the UK.

Health & safety concerns were also a mainstay in the guided tour through the premises, offered by SWEEEP's commercial manager, Justin Greenaway. A number of times, he highlighted the various measures that are taken for the protection of workers: regular blood samples are taken to monitor heavy metal levels, air quality measuring devices are worn on the work clothing of employees, findings about newly discovered hazardous and explosive components (e.g. gas bottles) are shared with other companies in the industry. Similarly, the online promotional videos for the plant emphasize its cleanliness.

Nevertheless, our experience of the visit was overshadowed, at times literally, by clouds of dirt and dust. Unlike the work we witnessed and participated in in Lagos and Hong Kong, which consisted mainly of disassembly and detachment of specific components, the processes at SWEEEP are based on grinding and pulverizing devices, after which the particles are separated according to material. Whilst this process allows for a much higher rate of recycling through the use of hi-tech machinery that sorts materials according to colour the grinding process causes a great amount of dust. Quite unlike the promotional video we found online and the documentaries we watched in the PR office with Jason, large parts of the factory were covered in thick layers of dust in which small shiny particles could be spotted with the bare eye. Dust could be felt. Surprisingly, most workers did not wear mouth protection and safety posters indicated that it was 'optional'.

The juxtaposition between this experience of the environment and the representation of the recycling processes in both explanatory narratives and promotional video material is prominent. Regardless of whether the dusty environment is actually hazardous for human health (we did not do any measurements), there is what we might call a 'performance of cleanliness' that lies at the heart of all these representations. Through an emphasis on safety measures in conversations about the site, and the prominent visual cleanliness in the videos, the high efficiency of the process in terms of resources recovery is convincingly connected to a notion of cleanliness and health. However, Paradoxically, most participants felt that the high dust concentration made the actual site appear much less clean than the Vannex factory in Hong Kong and even the dump site in Lagos. The 'performance of cleanliness' also came to mind in Jennifer Gabrys' presentation at the Bodies of Planned Obsolescence event we organized as part of the V&A Museum's Digital Futures series later on in the week. Jennifer discussed protective suits worn at the Intel IC plant in Silicon Valley. Although the suits' appearance suggest a clean and safe working environment, they merely protect the products from dust pollution originating from human bodies. They don't actually protect the workers' bodies from hazardous substances.

In the days following our visit to SWEEEP, we conducted a workshop to share our observations and reflections on our participatory work in Lagos and Hong Kong and the site visit in Sittingbourne. After presenting our ideas of the last months to each other, and revisiting the shared online document we had worked on since the end of the Hong Kong workshop, we identified five thematic areas of interest: consumer electronics and dust, e-waste in cyborgs, shared methodologies, bodies and global exchanges, tools and the local/global.

Each of these themes was then explored by a small group of 2-4 participants, resulting in the shared creation of a number of interdisciplinary artefacts and short texts. These materials formed the basis of our exhibition at Watermans Centre. An overview of the exhibtion will follow shortly.

Photographer Peter Dammann accompanied us in Lagos and Hong Kong.

In May, his heart stopped.

Our friend and colleague returned to dust.

text: Dani Ploeger, photos: Peter Dammann

Shopping centers with dozens of tiny electronics shops, filled with young men glaring at gadgets; an Apple store with almost as many staff as customers, who queue to buy products at any time of the day; metro passengers tapping away on the latest mobile phone models, almost too big tohold for an old fashioned phone call. In the shadows of this apparent consumer paradise we found an intricate world of small recycling companies, charities curiously specialized in used electronics, and shady traders on an unofficial e-waste night market. The Hong Kong workshop was full of paradoxes and surprises. Judging from the groundbreaking research on e-waste recycling of the project's co-investigator, Janet Chan, and other Hong Kong-based toxicologists, one might expect an electronic waste recycling infrastructure that is of an equally advanced level as the techno consumer culture that dominates the city's shopping malls and public spaces. However, most recycling initiatives in Hong Kong, as well as their labour processes, are remarkably small scale and manual handling-oriented. For this workshop, the participant group consisted of Janet Chan (Hong Kong University), Shu Lea Cheang (Independent artist), Neil Maycroft (University of Lincoln), Irini Papadimitriou (Victoria & Albert Museum), Chris Williams (Institute of Education, University of London), and myself. Jelili Atiku was not able to join due to visa problems. Similar to the Lagos workshop, the group's participation in e-waste recycling labour, which forms the centre of the project, took place in the context of a range of other explorations and experiences of (new and used) consumer technology. In addition to two days at Vannex International Ltd., where we dismantled computers and monitors, we spent time playing around in the city's foremost Apple Store in the IFC Mall on Hong Kong Island, visited the Caritas Computer Workshop, and made excursions to the Golden Computer Centre and the Apliu Street Market at Sham Shui Po in Kowloon.

The Apple Store is among the best situated shops in the IFC mall in central Hong Hong. Located right next to one of the entrances, a glass wall covers the entire two floors, offering views on the water front, ferris wheel, and some of the downtown skyscrapers. I play around with an iPhone 6 plus, an extra large model which is clearly the preferred size here. The internet browser shows that the user before me visited an online currency converter to calculate the price of the device in Chinese Yuan; many customers here are shopping tourists from mainland China who take advantage of the cheaper prices of consumer electronics in Hong Kong. I speak to a salesperson and ask her why I should buy a Mac to do my photo editing. She tells me that Apple devices have great design and battery life, and that iPhoto can now recognize the faces of my friends.

The Golden Computer Centre at Sham Shui Po is in many ways the opposite of the Apple Store. Numerous tiny shops illuminated by fluorescent light display rows of laptops donned with brightly coloured signs that state price and technical specifications. The air is filled with a smell of new plastic and circuit boards. It is early Saturday evening and the narrow pathways between the shops are crowded with people. Unlike the Apple Store's mixed clientele, the customers here are predominantly young men, most of them in pairs or by themselves, some accompanied by their girlfriends. This is the kind of electronics retailing I remember from my 1990s childhood as a computer geek. In Europe this kind of shop has pretty much disappeared by now. In an act of nostalgia I go to one of the component shops and get myself a quote for a custom-built machine, stuffed with high end processors, graphics card, and memory. The attendant assisting me appears to know all the serial numbers and specifications by heart and types them into his computer at lightning speed. The motherboards and CPUs on display in the shop look spectacular. The colourful and flashy heat sinks and cooling fans, accompanied by text printed next to the components on the boards to celebrate their power ('GPU boost', 'TurboV') are reminiscent of the lowered BMWs with quadruple exhaust pipes and decorative spoilers one encounters on Saturday nights in European rural communities. Quite different from the lifestyle design of the exterior of Apple's computers, the design aspect here appears to be focused on a celebration of computing power for those who engage with the physical insides of the machines.

Despite these differences there is an important similarity between this chaotic computing power paradise and the stylish Mac Store: both places promote a desire for the latest, newest consumer technologies, albeit in different ways. Ironically, this desire even appears to prevail among those who are engaged in the e-waste recycling industry in Hong Kong. During our visit of the Computer Workshop of the catholic charity Caritas, social worker and workshop supervisor, Chun-Wai Cheung, explains to us that they collect old equipment from 'middle class' families to refurbish for the 'needy', or to dismantle for recycling. A similar focus on discarded devices as a solution for the underprivileged is prominent in a presentation given to us by Lawrence Cheung from the Hong Kong government Environmental Protection Department during our symposium at Hong Kong University on the last day of the workshop. Refurbishment of used computers appears to only be considered as a solution to provide computer access to the 'deprived' who cannot afford a new system, rather than an alternative for any member of the general public who don't require state of the art devices to satisfy their everyday IT needs. During the week before the other participants arrive, Peter Dammann and I are taken for a walk through the informal second hand electronics market a few blocks away from the computer centre by Lisa Leung, a cultural theorist based at Lingnan University. This shadow market opens every evening after the regular market stalls have closed and the Environmental Protection Department's officers have gone home for the night. In the streets right next to Sham Shui Po metro station, small traders sell individual devices mingled with piles of old cables and chargers spread out on blankets on the street. Walking on, larger enterprises start to appear in the less busy and more sparingly lit streets. Makeshift warehouses behind shop front shutters reveal stacks of used televisions, computers and audio equipment, whilst trucks offload seemingly random collections of battered electric and electronic goods on the sides of the street. A few South Asian and African men are busy inspecting and testing devices. In front of one of the makeshift warehouses we get in conversation with Mike, a trader from Imo, a town in South East Nigeria. He tells us that he travels to Hong Kong every two weeks to buy a container full of used electronics, which he sells at an electronics market in his home town. According to Mike, most African traders who frequent this market are Nigerians, and a number of them actually sell their products at Alaba Market in Lagos, where our first workshop took place.

On our next visit to the market, joined by the other project participants, we visit the same warehouse. We look at a pile of dirty and rusty computer cases that are piled up in the back. When Janet Chan, the project's Co-Investigator, asks the owner in Cantonese what he will do with them, the trader immediately assumes that we are in the e-waste business. Janet spontaneously decides to play along and tells the owner that I'm a trader from the UK and that she's my agent in Hong Kong. It turns out that he operates a second site, closer to the mainland border, from where he organizes e-waste imports and exports. He tells us that it would be very easy to send him our waste and that we don't need any special permits. Although forbidden according to the Basel Convention, we are assured that we can even send him batches of entirely broken devices. We should contact him via Whatsapp with pictures of our cargo, after which he will send us a quote. We pay for the transport of a 20 or 40 feet container and he will pay us for our waste, which he will then send on to mainland China for recycling. It's even easier for American companies he says, because their government pays for the transport of their e-waste to Hong Kong.

At the Vannex e-waste recycling plant we are greeted by Carmen Wong and Milli Wong, the company's  Marketing Manager, and Environmental Health and Safety Officer. Vannex is one of the main e-waste recyclers in Hong Kong and the only company that is licensed to recycle cathode ray tubes from colour televisions and monitors through chemical processes. Most dismantling work is done manually with the help of air pressure screw drivers. Considering this, it is quite remarkable that the company has only about 30 employees of which 20 are engaging in actual recycling labour; how can the vast stream of discarded electronics from Hong Kong possibly be coped with if there are merely a few recycling enterprises of this size? We are hosted with great generosity throughout the two days we spend at Vannex. We are allowed to occupy the ordinary work places and receive instructions from the company's regular workers, thus greatly reducing the factory's productivity for two days. At lunch time, we are even offered festive meal in the canteen, together with the workers.

After an introduction to the company's activities and an induction to the safety procedures around the work we are going to undertake each one of us is assigned to a different area on the workfloor, dedicated to the disassembly of a particular item: desktop computers, monitors, laptops, as well as hard disk data removal and stripping PC motherboards of memory chips and CPUs. We rotate after each block of a few hours, so each participant takes part in several of these activities over the course of the two days we spend at the factory.

I take part in the following activities: -Dismantling desktop computers. Using a pneumatic screwdriver, I unscrew the case and subsequently all the interior parts of the system. Yin, one of the regular workers who mentors me, shows me the idiosyncrasies of different models, different screws. Bits of the screwdriver are exchanged, movement is swift and effortless, but where are the screws? Each brand has its own logic it seems. The outside of the cases is often still in clean and in neat condition, but inside: dust! Unexpectedly, the sterile-looking mouth protection mask we have been provided is actually a necessity here. Pulling out the power and data cables from the machines' interiors makes me feel like a butcher removing intestines from a carcas. The experience of abjection doesn't go all the way though: the repetitious screwdriver action in conjunction with the successive exchange of the bits gradually reduces my experience of the computers to collections of particular types of screws; very different from my everyday experience of these devices as sophisticated communication media that oftentimes make me ignore their physical practicalities.

-Separating CPUs and memory from motherboards. I wore quite thick working gloves to handle the desktop cases, but now I use smooth, thin ones - and sometimes my bare hands - that allow me to undo the clips of the memory strips and the small handles that release the CPUs. These parts are all from machines between 10 and 15 years old and appear designed to enable users to independently increase memory and upgrade to a faster CPU. This is no longer so convenient – if not impossible - with contemporary (mini, laptop and tablet) computers. My fingers are gradually getting used to the sharpness of the soldering joints on the backs of the circuit boards, the legs of the chips, pointy components sticking out. Also here I am drawn to the stark opposition between the smooth outsides of the computers and the noisy landscapes (visually and haptically) we find inside them. Some of the circuit boards stand out: the flashy car tuning-like parts I also encountered in the Golden Computer Centre. Streamlined blue and purple heat sinks, some even equipped with ornamental gold-coloured heat sinks on the memory cards.

-Dismantling laptops. I use the pneumatic screwdriver to remove all screws from the device, first from the back, then, after detaching the battery and the keyboard, from the motherboard inside. Although all devices are opened up following the same general pattern, the challenge is again to find for each brand and model where the screws are located and what tricks to use to flip off the keyboard. Each individual part of the device is put in a different box: battery, screen, keyboard, hard disk, DVD drive, fan, copper parts, aluminium, rest plastic. I do this for several hours and whilst I am working I think about the similar work I did in Lagos three weeks earlier. As a matter of fact, the work in the factory here is not that different, except for two important aspects: Firstly, the more powerful mechanized tools and the more regulated and protected environment make the engagement with the materials seem somewhat distantiated. Secondly, unlike the selective hunt for precious parts at the site in Lagos, the meticulous separation of the different components at Vannex is not primarily driven by a worker's assessment of the potential value of the different parts. Here, it feels more like he fulfillment of a task for its own sake; the assignment is to separate the parts to enable recycling, regardless of their individual monetary value.

"You look like Harry Potter's school class", Carmen says during another shared lunch with the project participants. At our symposium, 'E-waste and Global Exchange', at Hong University on the last day of the workshop, we receive similarly startled responses from the policymaker and scientist-dominated audience. Although I am not a big fan of Harry Potter, I guess Carmen's comparison may actually be quite appropriate: the eclectic mix of cultural theorists, scientists and artists that make up our group surely must appear curious to somebody working in industrial recycling or toxicology research; the idea of rethinking and 're-doing' (whatever this may turn out to be) of electronic waste through this odd collective's hands-on exploration of recycling labour may indeed be a methodology suitable for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  Over the next months, we will exchange our work experiences and explore possibilities for shared ideas, artefacts, and actions. The outcomes will be presented at the project's concluding workshop at Watermans in London, 29 June – 4 July. Who knows, we might come up with some Harry Potter-like e-waste 'Transfiguration' tactics, or a 'Defence Against the Dark Arts' of techno consumerism.

text: Dani Ploeger, photos: Peter Dammann

The Lagos workshop ended last week and I am writing this on my way to Hong Kong, where the second workshopwill start next week. I'll take this moment (just after breakfast, two hours before landing) to write a brief report on some of the things we did in Lagos. A more reflective account, as well as a collection of individual perspectives from each of the participants will follow at a later point.

The time in Lagos was turbulent in many ways and I think that the events that accompanied and surrounded the three days during which we actually participated in e-waste recycling labour need to be acknowledged if we want to pursue the participatory methodology of the project earnestly: The political framework of the movement and processing of electronic waste is not limited to the social and material dimensions of the working places we entered at the dump site. The broader context in which the workshop took place gives insights into, as well as affected the way our visit to/ intrusion of/ integration in (these all apply to a certain extent I feel) the recycling sites took shape and was experienced.

Shortly after starting the preparations for the workshop, Peter Dammann, Jelili Atiku, our guide Adeola, and I are robbed whilst stuck in a traffic jam: four men come up to the car, smash the windows and demand that we hand over our belongings. In the following days, we are frequently stopped by traffic police officers who request bribes, apparently because some of us are white. On one occasion, two police officers are shot down by an armed civilian on a motorbike, whilst one of them has the papers of Kehinde Olubanjo - a local environmental scientist in our group who drives the car - in an attempt to get a bribe. Last but not least, during one of the last nights our hotel catches fire. The fire alarm doesn't work, staff doesn't know what to do, and the gate of the premises is too narrow for the fire truck to enter. Chris Williams crawls through the toxic smoke and narrowly escapes. Shu Lea is stuck in her room and after smashing her window with a chair, she escapes from the second floor with a found ladder which we placed under her window.

Besides these somewhat dramatic incidents, it is generally difficult to move around with the group in public space. There is virtually no tourism in Nigeria and the locations we visit are hardly ever frequented by foreigners. The presence of caucasian and asian bodies invariably effects excited responses, often friendly, but sometimes suspicious or aggressive. This constant high level of attention makes it challenging to navigate public space and informally explore different aspects of used electronics trading and repair, also for the local participants in the group.

This difficulty also dominates our navigation around Alaba Market, an enormous market in the western outskirts of Lagos which includes one of the biggest used electronics trading sites in Nigeria. After recommendation by Kehinde, who has done research into informal e-waste recycling across Nigeria, and with the help of Ibrahim, a local second hand electronics salesman from Jelili's neighborhood Ejigbo, we eventually end up at a small dump site connected to the market. A large open space with piles of all sorts of materials and devices: iron casings of flat screen televisions, computers and household appliances; keyboards and other plastic shells; CDs, DVDs and their boxes; cables and other peripherals. The site is surrounded by small residential huts, behind which there is a general dumping area with domestic waste and non-recyclable left overs of the e-waste (mainly plastic). Some workers are burning cables here to extract copper, whilst a herd of cows grazes the place for eadible left overs in the domestic waste.

After making the necessary arrangements with the so-called Market Association (which includes a substantial private 'donation' to one of the chairmen in order to 'guarantee our safety'), we meet two groups of workers. They are all migrants from the North of the country; Muslims who speak Hausa and generally only a little Pidgin English. This makes communication more challenging than expected, since our Nigerian participants only speak Yoruba and Igbo, in addition to Pidgin. The first group of young men, led by Mohammad, work primarily on the dismantling of larger items such as televisions and microwaves to extract iron and aluminium, whilst the second group - working at a small backyard next to the dump - retrieve metal parts and components from circuit boards and open up transformers and fridge pumps to extract copper wire. Initially, our arrival at the sites causes much excitement, partly because of the mere presence of 'the white man', but also because of our request to be mentored in recycling techniques by the workers and subsequently work alongside them for two days. I explain to them that the project particpants tend to only ever encounter consumer electronics as polished black boxes in their everyday lives and that we hope that participating in their way of working with the insides of these devices will offer us another perspective. After agreeing with the leaders of the groups on a reasonable compensation for the mentoring and the loss of productivity that would result from our presence at the workplace, we start out.

Spread out over three sessions, taking place over three days, the project participants each engage and participate in the place and its processes in different ways. This is some of the work I take part in:

-Harvesting circuit boards for copper (usually coils), aluminium (heat sinks), high capacity transistors, and microchips. I work with, and am guided by Basu. It quickly becomes apparent that we have a similar rudimentary knowledge of the components on the circuit board and their functions. However, our interactions with the material are very different. I am used to touching the boards with great care and am always fearful to cause damage. Basu shows me that I shouldn't be totally careless in the way I handle the boards here, but need to find a balance between finesse (valuable components need to be taken out in perfect condition) and speed (no time should be wasted on delicately detaching copper and aluminium).

-Opening up transformers to take out copper wire. I learn a range of variations to unwrap different kinds of coils. The big transformers are cut through with a knife and hammer. The knives are discarded traditional farming and butchers knives, usually broken into several pieces. These artefacts gradually disappear during the heavy duty use at the recycling site, and show the traces of the specific techniques of their application here.

-Dismantling flatscreen televisions. This is done very quickly and usually only the iron and aluminium casings are retrieved. Unscrewing the devices and ripping out and throwing away their insides feels very much like slaughtering to me; an abject journey into the intestines. When I see a working television now, I often impulsively imagine how I could screw it apart and dismantle it effectively.

-Dismantling computers and hifi components. Material decay in all sorts of forms – rust, dirt – makes the devices increasingly resistive to my screwdriver; the machines that have not been exposed to the elements for too long yet come apart in a steady rhythmic interaction with the tools, whilst decaying screws and covers necessitate a struggle for access (usually ending in brutal attempts to break things open).

In addition to these engagements with materials, there is also a broader dimension to the work process: I take on my tasks with a fanaticism and almost obsessive ambition to do well and be as productive as possible, taking only short and infrequent breaks, pretty much exhausting myself within a few hours. Very differently, the actual workers tend to work the entire day – as long as it is light - but interrupt their tasks frequently to socialize, play cards and pool billiards (there is a pool table in the corner of the yard). Whilst there appears to be a clear rhythm in the work, both in terms of the engagement with the materials and the (social) interaction within the group, there doesn't appear to be a structure where the leader checks carefully on working hours or how hard individual people are working. When I ask one of the guys next to me, Abu Bakr, how they determine who gets how much of the yard's income in relation to the amount of work each of them has done, he simply answers 'we share it'.

We are in Lagos! After a week of explorations of dump sites, second-hand electronics markets and scrap yards around Lagos we will start our workshop tomorrow. With a group of seven performance artists, cultural theorists and scientists from Nigeria, UK, Netherlands and USA we will be participating in manual recycling labour on a small electronics dump at Alaba Market in the western outskirts of the city. Informal recycling workers will introduce us to their labour processes and teach us. Subsequently, we will work alongside them for two days. The activities will be documented by Swiss/German photographer Peter Dammann.

In preparation of the Lagos workshop next month, we have been exchanging some of our previous research and artwork related to electronic waste and performance to explore shared interests.

A selection of the work is listed at the bottom of this post..

Some shared themes...

Contamination:

Janet: Contamination through toxic food (primarily fish) and air.

Shu Lea: Fresh Kill – people and pets in NYC are affected by consumption of toxic fish. UKI – contamination in different ways: software, hardware, human bodies.

Jelili: Afamoko - Body is 'macro-contaminated' with e-waste objects (large objects attached to body with cling film)

Neil: the clean, wealthy consumer of 'green' commodities vs. contaminated worker bodies

Performance and/of danger:

Janet: informal e-waste recycling and body burdens (toxic fume exposure etc)

Dani: Recycled Coil – inserting copper wire (e-waste) in body (danger of poisoning)

The ideology of eco-marketing:

Neil: 'green' designer products made with recycled materials often increase/justify generation of waste in capitalist frameworks → counterproductive

Shu Lea: Fresh Kill – GX corporation markets 'Eco-Cat' food in response to toxic food scandal of their own making (waste creates markets)

Dani: Is Recycled Coil an example of consumerist 'green designer art'?

Irini? Once in museum collection, (e-)waste is no longer waste...

Jelili: At Lagos computer market, old electronics from Europe are wrapped in cling film to make them look like new products

The ambiguous game of waste definition / treatment:

Neil: to 'discard' in card game / to discard commodities: ambiguous rules around definition and treatment of waste.

Jelili: Can e-waste and rejected human bodies be considered waste in comparable ways (connection of e-waste and Nigerian bodies)?

Shu Lea: UKI – 'viral game' involving human performers, e-waste, and viral software.

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Jelili Atiku

Afamoko (performance, 2014)

At transmediale festival (Berlin), Jelili's body is wrapped in cling film, together with a large amount of electronic waste from Lagos. He is subsequently pushed on a plateau with wheels in a procession around the festival venue.

http://www.anotherafrica.net/wp/wp-content/gallery/jelili-atiku/AA_Jelili_Atiku_08.jpg

Janet Chan

Janet Kit Yan Chan, Ming H. Wong (2013), 'A review of environmental fate, body burdens, and human health risk assessment of PCDD/Fs at two typical electronic waste recycling sites in China', Science of the Total Environment 463–464 (2013) 1111–1123

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22925483

Shu Lea Cheang

Fresh Kill (movie; 1994)

This fictional feature film started with my concerns over industrial waste (toxic, nuclear, electronic waste)'s one way export to developing countries and less-privileged areas. Employing multi-cast, multi-stream narratives, I reversed the waste export scheme as toxic fish imported from the Pacific ocean is unknowingly being served as delicacies in fancy Japanese restaurent in New York city. Coined an eco-cybernoia film, the film also unites hackers in NYC with activists in Africa to uncover Corporate's cover up scheme.

http://www.vdb.org/titles/fresh-kill

UKI (viral performance/viral game, 2009-14)

I started working with redundant robots and replicants by discarding them among e-waste land.

The storyline develops merging hardware/software virus, the digital contagion, the viral bodies, resulted in performative/game work, UKI viral performance viral game.

UKI viral performance-live code live spam (2009-2014):

https://vimeo.com/37978993

Neil Maycroft

‘Ambiguity’, The Discard Studies Compendium 

Ambiguity marks many of the processes and objects that comprise 'wasting'. Discard studies, as an emerging discipline that values cross-disciplinary research, is well placed to embrace such inexactness. Indeed, the verb ‘discard’ is itself ambiguous having meanings ranging from the playful, through mild versions of casting off or divesting, to more assertive notions of rejection and

abandonment. However, the original meaning of discard was to throw out a card from a hand in a card game and, significantly, within that context the activity of discarding was specific and rule-bound.

www.discardstudies.com/discard-studies-compendium/

'Re-valorizing rubbish: some critical reflections on ‘green’ product strategies', Capital & Class, No 72, 2000.

http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2064/1/Revalorising_Rubbish.pdf

Irini Papadimitriou

Curation of events around obsolete technology / e-waste at Victoria & Albert Museum and Watermans art centre, London:

http://www.zprod.org/zwp/robot/is-technology-eating-my-brain-pt1/ (with artist Paul Granjon at Watermans)

http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/media/uploads/files/Digital_Design_Weekend_Programme_-_Online_3.pdf

Dani Ploeger

Recycled Coil (artwork, 2014)

E-waste is installed on my abdomen by a body piercer at transmediale festival 2014 in Berlin. http://vimeo.com/95757218

'Towards Abject Digital Performance: Engaging the politics of electronic waste' (currently under review for Leonardo)

On invitation by curator Klio Krajewska, Dani Ploeger spent a week in Cairo, Egypt to work with local crafts people. The artwork, Charging, will be part of a group exhibition in Cairo in February 2015.

Charging

In collaboration with metalworkers in the old city of Cairo, I wrapped an Apple iPad Mini and a Samsung Tab 3 in metal. The devices are enclosed entirely, except for the power connector, and will be exhibited on plinths with a built-in power socket. They will be charging for a long time. The regularity of fragile and fast obsoleting mass-produced consumer electronics is contained by robust and individually constructed low-tech artefacts. Visitors are invited to handle the devices.

In the beginning of October, Dani Ploeger was invited to take part in the workshop 'Love in E-waste' at the Participatory Design Conference in Windhoek, Namibia, supported by a grant from the Fetzer Institute. http://loveinewaste.wordpress.com/

I presented the following short position paper, which outlines some inital thoughts on methodology for the Bodies of Planned Obsolescence workshops in Nigeria and China, early 2015.

E-waste, participation, methodology (in arts, science and cultural studies)

‘Bodies of Planned Obsolescence: Digital performance and the politics of electronic waste’ is an art-science research networking project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. The project uses and develops strategies in digital performance art, cultural studies, and science to engage with the political, sociological and ecological issues around electronic waste in countries that export (UK) and import (Nigeria and China) used technology. An international group of artists, cultural theorists and scientists will follow a practice-based approach to explore the materiality of obsolete and discarded electronic devices in a series of workshops, symposia and exhibitions in Hong Kong and Guiyu, China, Lagos, Nigeria, and London, UK. Central to the workshops in Nigeria and China will be two practice-based explorations around the material and social aspects of e-waste recycling. The core participants of the project will spend several days working at improvised and industrial e-waste recycling facilities in Lagos and Hong Kong, guided by – and alongside – local workers. These shared experiences will form the basis for an exchange between participants from different disciplines, which may in turn inform new approaches to methodology in their respective fields of research. From the perspective of Western observers, informal e-waste recycling in West-Africa and the Far East is often perceived solely as a harmful activity for health and environment. However, local perspectives are more ambiguous. For many recycling workers, who are usually aware of health hazards, the value of the materials in discarded electronics means that recycling is also considered a reliable and substantial source of income in an economic context where often few other viable strategies to make a living are available. The same is the case for the broader questions around export of old computers and other electronics from OECD to non-OECD countries. Whilst the one-way displacement of old devices to West-Africa and other regions eventually generates large quantities of electronic waste, affordable, second-hand consumer technologies are also very much in demand in these countries. Thus, propagating a wholesale ban on the export of obsolete electronics will raise other, complicated questions around the ethics of capitalist modes of exchange and the politics of international development cooperation.

Research methodologies in science and cultural studies have often focused on observing processes and activities from an outsider perspective; the researcher positions her- or himself as an observer who describes and analyses a phenomenon. This approach has also been common in research in the field of electronic waste, and may have contributed to the prevalence of rather simplistic representations of the politics of electronic waste in Western popular media. Anthropologist Tim Ingold has critiqued outsider observation-based research methodologies in anthropology and archaeology in his recent book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013)​. Suggesting that anthropology should be based on studying ‘with people’ and hoping to ‘learn from them’ (p.2), Ingold proposes to turn to methodologies in art practice to develop new ways of 'doing anthropology' (p.8). He argues that art history and ethnography have in common a desire to examine the world through observation of artefacts, performance, and documentations. Instead, art and craft practices to a large extent evolve around studying the world through practical explorations of its materials, forms, and actions. It is this latter approach that Ingold identifies as a potentially fruitful methodological resource for the practice of anthropology and archaeology.

Ingold offers an example of an implementation of such methodology by means of a discussion of how a crafts-based engagement with pre-historic biface handaxes leads to very different perspectives on its possible historical significance than traditional historical studies, which have primarily built on the observation of archaeological artefacts. The specifics of this example are beyond the scope of this short position paper, but the general shift from observation to practical exploration of labour processes is central to the methodology of 'Bodies of Planned Obsolescence'. Thus, the project seeks to extend Ingold's application of arts and crafts-based approaches in anthropology and archaeology to the realm of science and cultural studies of electronic waste; a field of research in which detailed aspects of manual labour skills and sensibility have thus far been little considered.

This also means that the project has a significant participatory dimension. The practical workshops are aimed at facilitating knowledge transfer through a shared engagement in specific activities. Here, e-waste workers are not approached as subjects of study, but as experts who guide the project participants in developing a more detailed engagement with materials and their related recycling processes. It is important to note that the objective of these activities is not to create an illusion that the artist and academic participants will gain first hand knowledge of ‘what it is like’ to work in e-waste recycling in day to day life. As project participants will undertake these labour activities in the knowledge that their livelihood is not dependent on it and they can and will return to their comfortable hotels afterward, their experience of the work will hardly be comparable to that of the people they will be working with. Instead, the workshops in Lagos and Hong Kong will be aimed at establishing a framework that facilitates the development of research methodologies that are rooted in an awareness of different experiences of physical and intersubjective processes in industrial and informal e-waste recycling.

On 20 September, we launched Bodies of Planned Obsolescence at the Victoria & Albert Museum's Digital Design Weekend. Dani Ploeger presented the project, whilst participants Janet Chan and Jelili Atiku contributed to the launch via video transmission. The project will run until September 2015 and include workshops in Lagos (Nigeria), Hong Kong and Guiyu (China) and London (UK).

The launch was accompanied by the exhibition of the installation work Back to Sender (2013-14), which Jelili and Dani made earlier this year. The preparation of this work formed one of the starting points for the proposal for Bodies of Planned Obsolescence.