New Obsolescence returns for a three-day ReFunct Media Workshop with Benjamin Gaulon at Fire Station Artists’ Studios.
Voluntarily complex and unstable, ReFunct is an experiment with the unchallenged possibilities of “obsolete” electronic and digital media, questioning e-consumption and our relationship with technology, where participants are invited to create a collective installation using various types of e-waste.
Based on the project initiated in Ireland by Benjamin Gaulon and re-iterated over many versions and collaborations with Karl Klomp, Gijs Gieskes, and Tom Verbruggen as a series of multimedia sculptures that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers), ReFunct devices are hacked, misused, and combined into a complex chain of elements; they interact, to use an ecological analogy, in symbiotic mutualist, parasitic, or commensalist relationships.
Benjamin Gaulon is an artist, researcher, educator, and cultural producer based in Paris.
His research focuses on the limits and failures of information and communication technologies, planned obsolescence, consumerism and disposable society, ownership, and privacy, through the exploration of détournement, hacking, and recycling.
Previously operating under the name “recyclism”, his projects can be software or web based, open source, interactive, installations and hardware, or street art interventions.
Together with Dasha Ilina, he is a founding member of the collective NØ, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to support and promote emerging art and design research and practices that address the social and environmental impact of information and communication technologies in France and beyond. They are both co-directors of NØ SCHOOL NEVERS since its first edition in 2019.
He currently lectures at SciencesPo, at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay for the diplôme en Recherche-Création (ARRC), and at CentraleSupélec – Université Paris-Saclay. He was an associate professor at Parsons Paris, directing the MFA Design + Technology and the BFA Art, Media, and Technology program that he developed and launched in 2013. He previously taught at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and at CTVR / the telecommunications research centre at Trinity College, and led DATA (Dublin Art and Technology Association) in Dublin.
Image credit: Fire Station Artist Studios
