Phossils

Phossils are, more or less, fossilized phones. Here I subject media devices to extreme heat and cold, artificial pressure and geological time, or other intense conditions that weather and turn these materials into… something else. Through research, experimentation, and craft – including collaborations with biogeochemical and soil scientist Johannes Lehmann at Cornell University – I have tried to transform phones into crude oil, coal, or other fossil fuels, into synthetic archives and simulated relics for a future time. Cook, freeze, burn, smash, blend, and more… and put the results on exhibit, in beakers and tubes, on pedestals and stands, as archaeological finds and/or photographic images. Pictured are only a selection of these ongoing works.

Several of the Phossils series of sculptures also more readily reveal our lab/studio methods, and two of them break down over the course of the exhibition itself. These Ecokinetic Sculptures see a pile of phones in an air fryer, hard drives in a toaster, a water fountain cracking and peeling the glass of an iPhone (more quickly than you would expect), and a flipping hourglass that sands down a smart phone every sixty minutes.

It is impossible for humans to truly fathom our planet on its own terms and at its own size, or conversely from the perspective of bacteria. But we can feel such things, through art and storytelling – making our aesthetic encounters both conceptually and ethically vital toward new futures.