ReFunct Media 6 with Karl Klomp, Tom Verbruggen, Gijs Gieskes at RIXC for SAVE AS at Art+Communication 2013.

In the "Practice of Everyday Life" Michel de Certeau investigates the ways in which users-commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules-operate. He asserts:

"This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, "ways of operating" or doing things, no longer appear as merely obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them."

"ReFunct Media" is a series of multimedia installations that (re)uses numerous "obsolete" electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). Those devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they "interact" in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, "ReFunct Media" isn't proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores unchallenged possibilities of 'obsolete' electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.

Download DeFunct / ReFunct Publication (ISBN: 978-0-9570777-1-3)