I explore situations of conflict and crisis on the fringes of the world of high-tech consumerism. My objects, videos and software engage with the spectacles of waste, sex and violence and question the sanitized, utopian marketing surrounding innovation and its implications for local and global power dynamics.
Most of my work is informed by field research on the use of everyday technologies under extraordinary circumstances. I have made a VR installation while accompanying frontline troops in the Russo-Ukrainian war, travelled to dump sites in Nigeria to collect electronic waste originating from Europe, stolen razor wire from the so-called ‘hi-tech fence’ on the EU outer border in Hungary and interviewed witnesses of US drone attacks in Pakistan about the sounds of technologies of violence, among others.
My artwork is shown at museums, galleries and festivals for fine art and media art, such as ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Venice Architecture Biennale, Nairobi National Museum, transmediale, V&A Museum London, Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts, House of Electronic Arts Basel, The New Institute museum for architecture, design and digital culture in Rotterdam, WRO Media Art Biennale and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris. My writing has been published in books and academic journals including Leonardo, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination.
I am a Research Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, where I am currently leading an artistic research project into the appropriation of consumer technologies in Kenya. I am also an Associate Research Fellow at De Montfort University Leicester and a Fellow at V2_Lab for the unstable media in Rotterdam, where I am conducting a media archaeological investigation into the use of hacked consumer electronics in Improvised Explosive Devices from the 1980s until the present.
I am represented by Art Claims Impulse gallery in Berlin.
DANI PLOEGER