Newly Forgotten Technologies

Commissioned by: Science Gallery London & FutureEverything

Exhibitions: AI: Who's Looking After Us? (2023-24), Science Gallery London

An installation for 200 hacked ‘smart’ devices and the many possible futures of our relationship to AI and the world.

In this installation, two hundred discarded and abandoned smartphones, iPads, and smart speakers are laying in a darkened e-waste dump sometime in the near-future, while their onboard voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc) tell stories about how and why they were thrown away. Across the dozens of stories, many different possible futures are described where speculative technological, social, and ecological events change our relationship to AI and ‘smart’ technologies to the point where devices like these have been discarded. Some of these are futures we might want, and some we should try to avoid.  None of these stories describe computers becoming sentient, but all of them talk about the different ways that humans react and respond over time to a changing world.

The installation features almost 10,000 words of speculative fiction in the devices' stories, generatively arranged to create an always-different sonic space, and a unique form of storytelling. At any time in the installation, some devices throughout the space are telling their stories, while others whisper, hum, or utter broken half-sentences from their shattered speakers. The low-lit space is illuminated by the individual operating lights and broken screens of each device, creating an environment haunted by a civilisation’s trash. This simulation of an e-waste dump confronts audiences with a state of common technologies rarely seen in the Global North, though increasingly common in the Global South: thrown away, left to rot, and out of sight of the consumers these devices were intended for.

Newly Forgotten Technologies offers audiences many possible futures for where we go from now, and reveal how the future of AI technologies will always be intimately linked to the climate, extractive capitalism, societal and political change, and the complexities of human life.