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. I am currently working on the development of anarchist technologies for the Rojava Revolution in North-East Syria (more info on my Telegram channel: @rojavatech).
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, London Film Festival, Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts, House of Electronic Arts Basel and The New Institute museum for architecture, design and digital culture in Rotterdam. My writing has been published in books and academic journals including Leonardo, Journal of Environmental Media and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination. My book Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences: everyday technologies in extreme circumstances (2021) has been published with Triarchy Press.
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 (Disobedient Devices). I am also a Fellow at V2_Lab for the unstable media in Rotterdam, where I am conducting a machine archaeological investigation into the use of hacked consumer electronics in Improvised Explosive Devices from the 1980s until the present (Destructive Circuits).
My artwork is represented by Art Claims Impulse gallery in Berlin.
DANI PLOEGER