Darned Circuits
Dear Reader,
Have you marveled at the amount of clothing near the trash on the ground? Have you noticed a broken television in the garbage? Have you ever picked these items up?
I do.
I take discarded clothing and consumer electronics and transform them into objects from another reality; where computers have cloth screens and woven trackpads and jeans have butt patches that light up. In my world, parts of different items are combined in ways that challenge the expectations of products and the way we are used to seeing them.
In the real world, the United Nations reports that 62 billion kgs of e-waste were generated in 2022; the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that the equivalent of a truck full of clothing waste is burned or buried every second. We accept these absurdities as the cost of progress.
Instead of throwing away our old, broken, or simply unwanted items, we need to shift collective habits to actually fix this system, reimagine our items and prolong their useful life. Community repair efforts from Restart Parties, Repair Cafes, and Mend in Public Days, to individual repair habits are a place to start addressing these practical problems and deepening our connection to the objects in our lives. However, when repair is not even an option in our collective thoughts, when we face external pressure from advertisements and social judgement, why not embrace the weird?
Reader, what weird will you embrace? Maybe you will take pieces of a broken laptop to ‘mend’ your clothes or ‘fix’ your electronics with cloth and thread. Perhaps instead of just fixing objects, will you fix your relationship with them by transforming them into new items that break the conventions of purpose and usefulness. Or, will you try your hand at repairing your clothes in a traditional manner? Will you find a community that can help you fix your coffee machine that just stopped working? Can you keep your smartphone for just one year longer? I challenge you to begin bragging about how old your items are, because really, it’s ridiculous that we don’t view the longevity of our objects as a personal achievement.
I hope you will join me in this world of Darned Circuits where I imagine an opposite extreme, and perhaps, we can start conversations with those still stuck in reality, so that we can meet in the middle to repair more.
