https://en.aros.

dk/about-aros/press/2018/program-2019/

Returns of Waste, Today and Tomorrow

Ulrik Ekman :: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

The artworks in “Tomorrow Is the Question” crack open the history of our hyperconsuming society of
green and clean tech, recalling that while smart technologies may promise to clean our environments
with everything from urban greening projects and windmill parks to Roombas and smart toilets,1 we are
in fact simultaneously living in an unmistakably toxic era. Yes, technologies offer cleaner societies via
sewage systems, the modern apparatus of medicine, communication technologies, and green energy
systems. But they also already haunt us with what returns from obscene behaviors and lifestyles, even if
their return things are unevenly distributed along the fault lines of colonial infrastructures: trash,
excrement, bacteria, exploitation and non-decomposable material dirt and filth. Crucially, the exhibition
shows that the things we thought we had already thrown away by ordering and sanitizing our current
societies in fact return to haunt us tomorrow.2 The exhibition thus restages the power of the horror of
waste. It confronts us with abjects, phenomena from that borderland between the subjective and the
objective where elements we once categorized as our own are now placed as taboo, almost separated
off by our attempts at rejection. With philosopher Julie Kristeva, we could say that this exhibition
returns abjects into our individual and social lives, bits of what activates basic disgust and phobia (e.g.,
vomit, excrement, insects, corpses, dehumanized people, monstrous objects).3

In this way, the exhibition resets our contemporary situation of climate change to a more primal and
non-modern scene. It re-confronts us with what appears to threaten our sociocultural and individual
existence -- without letting us repeat the usual knee-jerk reaction: strict negation, pure exclusion and
elimination by rejection. Instead, it shows us that modern humans were never sustainable,4 and that
modern ways of life were always wastefully productive in both soft and hard ways that have eventually
generated the abhorrent environmental remainder we now face through climate change.

We live on a planet whose metabolic system we cannot escape.5 We are inevitably caught in the
continuous planetary metabolic processes of (ex)change and transformation of matter and energy.
These processes of biological and physical transformations occur at all scales, from what passes the cell
membranes in our bodies to what passes the screens and the nodes of the globally networked
technologies mediating matter, energy, and information. Climate change has renewed academic

1
attention to the issues of metabolic processes and their sustainability. But the idea of thinking about the
planet in metabolic terms was already present in the Anthropocene. Marx, for instance, had a profound
interest in the interactions between the human economy and the natural environment. Marx used
“metabolism” in two senses: as a biological metaphor to describe the circulation of commodities; as a
way to refer to the metabolism of society and nature which he saw as broken by a capitalist agriculture
of destruction.6 It is also at the crux of a failing metabolism that the artworks in ARoS’s exhibition
operate, asking complex questions about how metabolisms work. What does it mean to discard
sustainably? How are the intakes and outputs of our lives and environments already inherently
interconnected, and what does a ‘sustainable’ relation mean?

Echoing significant parts of the problem of waste, from present-day urban wastelands to future tech-
ruins, the exhibition sends us a message: our ‘smart’ technologies will waste ourselves, others, and our
planet out of existence. As Alfredo Jaar’s work points out, we might do well to “Be Afraid of the
Enormity of the Possible,” which in this context materializes as the looming disaster of climate change.
In a different but related way, Allora & Calzadilla’s “2 Hose Petrified Petrol Pump” reminds us that our
wasteful societies leave most permanently a set of monuments of pollution. We attest for the longest
time to our failure to respond to ongoing climate change. On this view, our legacy is less a matter of
thriving forests and rich ecosystems with which we can coexist and rather more a matter of fossilized
petrol pumps. This returns to us yet another abject – not only the toxic pollution of burning gasoline
and petrol, but also the way in which we must be said to be dying living with a cultural political ‘logic’
of oil and fossil fuels.7

More specifically, this exhibition questions our current technologies by engaging with the dirty
embodied nature of the political economy of information on the one hand, and the growing amount of
non-decomposable material waste that accumulates in the wake of ubiquitous computing on the other.

Dirty Bodies

Visitors engaging with Hito Steyerl’s The Tower (2015) and Simon Denny’s Games of Decentralized Life
(2018) are likely to find themselves rehearsing a key set of notions that have accompanied first the
invention and then the massive cultural spread of the modern computer as an information technology
capable (in principle) of universal simulation. Notably, these art projects critically rehearse the

2
persistent imaginaries of immaterial and virtually transcendent information, as well as clean and
transparent, free, politically egalitarian and democratizing, economically fair and non-exploitative digital
media.

Disrupting these tropes, Steyerl’s and Denny’s works direct our attention to the dirty truths of
information and digital media. Steyerl’s work shows us, almost silently echoing Marx, that the apparent
transcendence of virtual and digital culture is at once constituted and deconstituted by the dirt of
bodies and physical labor on information and communication technology. We are returned here to
consider once again the ways in which ideological discourses on class, gender, race, and attendant
colonial and patriarchal regimes of capitalist domination and exploitation have been, and still are, used
as privileging mechanisms for deciding whose lives are turned into waste, whose lives are “doomed to
wretchedness, degradation, abjection and servitude.”8 Steyerl’s work reintroduces laboring bodies and
the materiality of machinic power-knowledge, both of which problematize the attempt to legitimize
digitalization and the post-industrial as something immaterial. Their works remind us that neither
technology nor information ever lost their bodies, but rather continue to rely on human and
technological materialities to function while slowly going under. Moreover, Steyerl’s artwork reworks
the Tower of Babel fable to remind us that the seemingly smooth, clean functionality and transparency
of digital communications are in fact steeped in the dirt of the computational information machine and
its early modern precursors in electronics, electricity, steam, and coal. Not least, The Tower transforms
Jeremy Bentham’s classic vision of the Panopticon into a distributed and softly biopolitical control
room. Steyerl’s project thus reminds us of an often deliberately suppressed truth: the technologies that
are presented as tools of the free movement of information are predicated on cybernetic sciences of
control. Today on the brink of tomorrow, this raises questions about how to live in sustainable fashion
with a near-invisible governance of algorithmic devices.

If Steyerl brings back the body to the workings of information, Simon Denny’s installation shares the
broad questioning of the political economy of information and network societies. However, in the wake
of recent sensational financial speculation scandals, this installation also attunes us more acutely and
critically to the claims made by actors in the Internet economy that our computational systems can
erase economic inequality by virtue of being constituted as a dynamic, decentralized, and distributed
network of networks. This installation evokes for us as visitors the way in which new political
economies of the Internet still suppress inequalities.

3
At a first glance it problematizes new and unequal economic centralizations found in the form of tech
giants, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. A closer look, however, also gives us pause to
reflect on how these economic formations and the inequality they bespeak are now sought countered
by the invention of a supposedly more decentralized network drawing on the Bitcoin cryptocurrency
and its blockchain transaction ledger. Games of Decentralized Life thus addresses the third generation of
the Internet to hint that while we might today put our faith in new political-economic organizational
forms of the Internet, history tells us that no networked rejection of asymmetric and unequal
ascriptions of value was ever complete. Rather, this work has us realize that such inequalities always
return as a remainder of the dirty truth of money: in the process of de- and recentralized economic
systems, someone and something were always made more or less valuable than others and other things.

Both Steyerl and Denny’s works thus seem to suggest that the governance and the economy of today’s
network societies are on the brink of a tomorrow that echoes yesterday’s noise and the waste generated
by socio-technical inequalities.

Energetic Wastelands

The rejection of the body in technological imaginaries has environmental impacts beyond the dirty
truths of the political economy of information. Our mundane technologies and the practices connected
to them are thus at the root of an extreme exploitation not only of humans, but also of the
environment, in the form of energy loss.9 Why have we been oblivious to the fact that our technologies
consume massive amounts of energy? The answer is found in the dreams animating the history of
technology and information. We might locate it in the long-held dream about the infinite possibilities of
information cast as a realm of abundance, and we find it expressed in the well-known slogan
“information wants to be free.” This dream of free information deep down expresses not only a
political project of open access, but also a hope on a more fundamental energetic level that
“information will constitute a new regime, and an economy of exchange not bound by the laws of
conservation formulated for energy in the nineteenth century.”10 Until now, this dreamy hope has
reigned supreme. We have been told and tended to believe that copying is potentially endless, that
digital infrastructures will only increase and improve things, and that we will become socioculturally
better because more and more connected.

4
Today, however, such dreamy fables have become unsettled by competing narratives: stories about the
CO2 imprint of our Netflix streaming habits, the energy consumption of bitcoin, and the toxic
materiality of our technological devices. Indeed, we are facing a new paradigm shift in our perception
of media reality. After years of talk about clouds, ubiquity, and ephemerality, today’s discussions of new
technologies are much more attentive to technological infrastructures, their energy sources, and their
environmental impact. This shift demands a reconsideration of our relationship not only to information
but also to the devices that mediate it, their life cycles, and their energy metabolism. Indeed, such new
discussions importantly enact a re-joining of the regime of information with the world of energy and
matter.

This means adding layers of friction, grit and dirt to the clean interface of information. It means
obeying the laws of energy and its rules of input and output. More critically, it also means readjusting
our technological gaze from clean to messy. It calls for an understanding that the material reality of any
technological device holds much more complexity than our idea of their sleek surfaces. Our gadgets are
not smooth surfaces and isolated artefacts; they are gritty, smelly, toxic, and partake of delicate
ecosystems.

Big Tech often gets called upon to solve environmental problems, via solar and wind technologies, for
example, or it is drawn upon for its capacity to crunch large data sets, only to visualize impacts and
predict disasters. Datafication may even be framed as a crucial metabolic component. Thus, the energy
generated by our data traffic is now increasingly framed as a sustainable way of cooling our planet. Yet,
while tech is often envisioned to clean up our worlds, whether deployed as robot servants or as
optimized infrastructures, it is increasingly also transforming our planet into a de facto wasteland
through energy use and rare earth mineral mining, whose sources are primarily being depleted for the
production of our global communication devices.11

The wastelands accompanying digitization are not only related to the energy involved in data
consumption. Digitization and its waste cycles are also accompanied by geospatial demolition, such as
the demolition of spaces not deemed valuable to urban processes of technological progress. One very
material example of such a wasteland is the Agbogbloshie ‘tech dump’ on the periphery of Accra,
Ghana where much of our electronic waste is dumped and labour exploitation takes place. Another
exemplary case is the demolition of “old” spaces to give way to new and allegedly augmented digital
spaces. As Cao Fei’s work Rumba:Nomad signals, spatial technological ‘progress’ in Beijing is

5
accompanied by demolition and wasteland ‘regress’ at the urban fringes. Rumba:Nomad vividly depicts
the urban fringe of Beijing in which Roombas are given the Sisyphean task of cleaning up the detritus
left behind after the destruction of an old part of outer Beijing. The robots randomly navigate the
detritus of old neighbourhoods razed to make way for China’s ongoing technologized urbanization
processes. Fei’s work not only brings into focus the social impact of augmented urbanization, but also
provides a visual exploration of one of the largest consumers of physical resources, one of the great
depleters of finite landfill resources, and one of the largest producers of solid wastes globally: the
demolition industry. Augmented digitization gains a foothold in tandem with the demolition and waste
of neighbourhoods, in China and beyond.

Contingency of Tomorrow’s Wastelands

This exhibition confronts visitors with the dirty truths that are otherwise often sought repressed by the
tech industry: that information technologies contribute to an extremely wasteful society. Sanitizing
notions such as “the cloud”, more efficient automated systems, and clean or green technologies are
thus revisited to acknowledge the role played by the body, labor, energy, and materiality in tech
systems, and to suggest that our attempted rejection of such dirty truths now come to haunt us now in
the form of climate change. The exhibition prompts us to reflect on how the world of tech can be
aligned with the dream of sustainability. The works hint that the one most frequently mentioned cure
might be more of a poison. Putting our faith in a solution via scientific progress and more complex
technology might well give rise to bigger problems tomorrow. The works also hint at a second,
frequently heard response: the eco-critical proposal to engage in ascesis, to simplify oneself, to reduce
consumption and to waste less. Yet, the exhibition as a whole does not seem to emphasize a form of
human self-ascesis or self-reduction either.12

Instead, it raises questions concerning a general metabolic economy capable of digesting, among other
things, the complexity of those human cultures of waste formed in the image of Western modernity.

Instead of succumbing to determined dystopic narratives, however, the exhibition leaves us hanging in
an inspiring uncertain post-human register, encouraging us to think about sustainability beyond the
human perspective.

TeamLab’s fluid work “Universe of Water Particles” counters Mona Hatoum’s inflamed visions of the
world, immersing us instead in a meditative reflection on how our assembled world’s interwoven and

6
unpredictable dynamic forces can never be understood in linear terms, thus challenging our ideas and
unfolding narratives on progress, waste and climate change. In their virtual waterfall, hundreds of
thousands of water particles pours onto a sculpted rock. Drawing on the philosophy of premodern
Japanese painting, in which bodies of water were expressed using a series of lines, the work reflects on
water as a living entity. Fusing the objective world of computational calculations with the subjective
world of premodern Japanese people, TeamLab’s work offers us the possibility to immerse ourselves in
the work to connect to a premodern Japanese mode of perceiving and acting in the world. This is an
existential mode also foregrounded in their artist statement: “If we regard ourselves as part of nature,
and consider nature as something not just to be observed, it is possible to feel that there is no boundary
between ourselves and nature.”13 Enacting fluid immersion TeamLab’s work thus reminds us how the
world and our place within it need not be understood according to a linear logic of “progress” and a
singular logic of “autonomy,” but is perhaps rather to be intimated as a series of unpredictable and
interrelated movements that leaves space for both confusion and hope.14 The work show how we are
connected across both time and space, and how our actions today have profound impacts tomorrow, as
well as how these impacts are impossible to predict.

Responding to the human-centered framework of UN’s Sustainability Goals with a post-human

perspective, the exhibition asks us to recognize our interconnectedness with the environment, while
also affirming its profound otherness. In this fashion, the exhibition suspends any simplistic or definite
solution. Rather, it seems to privilege the uncertainty of asking us to try imagine the general sustainability
of tomorrow and how sustainability might materialize in a posthuman register. Via vague hints, echoes,
whispers and murmurs, it asks what togetherness we might envision for the blasted and polluted
landscapes of tomorrow that are in the making today. Putting liberal agency, progress and short-term
solutionism on pause, this exhibition offers another and more general, continuous relationality between
the physical world and diverse forms of life. How are other objects and species and their wastes
entangled with us and our wastes? And how might we imagine these entanglements not as concrete
walls with a definite inside and a definite outside but rather as multiplicities of porous and fluid
membranes for mutual transformations?

1 For a thought-provoking reconsideration of the history of excrement that also lays bare the ways in which the design of
toilets and sewage systems help constitute and delimit us as modern urban subjects, see Dominique Laporte, History of Shit
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
2 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002). 1966.
3 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

7
4 We use the term ’sustainable’ in a relatively loose sense of the capacity to support, maintain, and endure, specifically as
regards the ways in which living systems (including humans) remain diverse, robust, resilient, and productive in
environments over time. For a good introduction, see Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Sustainability: Key
Issues (New York: Routledge, 2015).
5 ‘Metabolism’ means change and transformation in Greek. A metabolism performs a biological and physical transformation

by expending energy and other matters across a membrane. It concerns the transports taking place in both directions across
a selective and permeable membrane. This could be through a cell membrane, through the complex layers of our skin, or
through an information filter such as a screen. Interestingly, the concept of metabolism is widely used in recent urban
studies, societal studies, ecological theories, sustainability studies, and non-anthropocentric engagements with the issue of
the Anthropocene.
6 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, vol. I. (Frankfurt-Vienna-Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1969). 1867.
7 The need for something other than continued petroculture has been noted by a range of eco-critics, one interesting

example being Imre Szeman’s work on energy humanities. Szeman, Imre. "System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the
Anticipation of Disaster." In Energy Humanities: An Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, 55-70. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
8 Achille Mbembe, “Democracy as a Community of Life”, The Salon, 4, 2011.
9 James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018).
10 Hayles, N. Katherine. "Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving from Energy to Information." In From

Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple
Henderson, 235-54. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, 235.
11 Mél Hogan, “Data Flows and Water Woes: The Utah Data Center.” Big Data & Society 2, no. 2 (2015).
12 Tainter, J. A. "Energy, Complexity, and Sustainability: A Historical Perspective." Environmental Innovation and Societal

Transitions 1, no. 1 (2011): 89-95.

13 TeamLab. Universe of Water Particles. 2013. https://www.teamlab.art/w/uowp.
14 Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic

Thinking.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 2 (2015): 247-64; Astrida Neimanis, "Hydrofeminism: Or, on
Becoming a Body of Water." In Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, edited by Henriette Gunkel,
Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Soderback, 85-100. New York: Pan Macmillan, 2012.