Dani Ploeger, 10- 25 June
For the past three years, Dani Ploeger has exposed his body to the stuff of techno consumer culture, ranging from brand-new objects of desire in British and American shopping malls, to the debris of discarded electronic devices on dumps and recycling sites in Nigeria and Hong Kong.
The Stuff of Machines brings together recent performance, installation and interactive work that explores and subverts the expectations and dreams surrounding everyday technologies, through an engagement with their materialness in connection to bodies: parts of old televisions were installed in the artist’s abdomen, tablet computers wrapped in sheet metal are left to charge forever, a petrol generator powered a computer inside a transparent box with the artist inside, and a magnified infected wound documents electronic waste recycling labour on a Nigerian dump site. Meanwhile, visitors are invited to lick an iPad to indulge in their own techno consumer fetishism.

www.daniploeger.org

This exhibition is linked to Bodies of Planned Obsolescence, a research project and group show which will follow in the gallery. Bodies of Planned Obscolescence is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Grant reference: AH/L01582X/1

Image credit: Dani Ploeger – FETISH (iPad app for oral interaction, 2014) Photo by Marco Berardi

Image credit: Dani Ploeger – Biotope. Photo by Marco Berardi.