ME AND MY TECHNOLOGY

Electronic trash sparks inspiration

Doug Carter finds his artistic vision

in the rubbish of the Information Age

Thursday, February 25, 1999

Kevin Marron special to The Globe and Mail

The Person: ”Doug Carter, 56,

a mixed-media artist from Dundas, Ont.

The Technology: Obsolete computers and other

Information Age debris used to create works of art.

The empty shell of a video monitor is stuffed with

broken circuit boards, disconnected cables,

discarded disks & other debris from the Information Age.

It is Doug Carter's vision of the millennium.

Mr. Carter is an artist who finds his material in things

that other people have thrown away. When he and

five other artists were asked to put on a show about

the coming millennium at the Art Gallery of Hamilton

he scoured the region looking for obsolete computers

and other unwanted pieces of technology that were

on their way to the dump.

High-tech garbage was easy to find, says the

56-year-old artist, who works as an administrator at

the Carnegie Gallery in Dundas, Ont. His prime

sources were dumpsters behind computer stores that

were throwing out hardware weekly, and a school

where teachers were storing old computers because

they couldn't find anyone to recycle them.

"There's a lot of stuff out there that people don't know

what to do with," Mr. Carter says. "So I went out and

got a bunch of stuff. I distributed it to the guys in the

show. Then we started taking hammers, saws and

screwdrivers to it and took it all apart."

He confesses that he enjoys breaking computers

apart, but Mr. Carter is no Luddite -- he's used a

computer for more than 10 years. "I like technology.

My only fear is that we don't watch the end result

closely enough. We can't make it go away."

"Be Afraid" is the title of the show that he has

mounted with fellow artists Ray Cinovskis, Chris

Eddy, Chris Hartnett, Brian Kelly and Jim Mullin.

They have put computer hardware, video equipment

and other technology together with old shoes, rusting

tools and other junk, creating a series of pieces on

display at the downtown Hamilton gallery until March 21.

Flashing red lights, a continuous loop of digital

sounds like those that come out of a modem, and a

clock that whirls around at breakneck speed

contribute to the sense of unease that the artists are

trying to convey about the arrival of the millennium.

Much of the derelict computer hardware in the show

is just a few years old. Mr. Carter says he wants to

make people think about the impact that this rapid

pace of obsolescence is having on our environment.

He believes that the year 2000 computer problem will

create even more waste as machines are discarded

in favour of hardware unaffected by the millennium bug.

"There's going to be a huge wave of old computers

coming to your local landfill site," says Mr. Carter,

who is the curator of the show as well as one of the

exhibitors. Some of the technology used in the exhibit

is still in working order and the artists have deconstructed

and reconfigured it to make disturbing statements about

some social trends.

For example, the artists were able to rig up an old

surveillance camera that the art gallery had

decommissioned and was sending to the dump. The

camera lens is now trained on a spot near the

entrance to the exhibit and live images of visitors to

the show are displayed on a video screen that has

been placed in a garbage composter in another

corner of the room. "There are security cameras run by

computer systems everywhere checking up on everybody

these days," Mr. Carter observes.

But Mr. Carter hopes the show also communicates

the wonders and beauty of technology.

"The more I saw the inner workings of a computer the

more I wanted other people to see it. I thought it was

marvelous," he says. "When you take a compact

disc drive apart, you find a little glowing crystal that's

like a little gem. That's the exciting part of taking a

computer apart, getting down to that mechanism.

That's the little point of focus that all the information

comes through from the CD to the unit that reads it

into the hard drives."

Seeing the inside of a computer leads Mr. Carter to

think about where all the parts came from: "Once you

expose the inner components, you start realizing that

there's got to be factories all over the world making

this stuff, supplying all the different metals and

assembling it all. Small countries could have whole

economies based on this stuff." And it also leads him to

speculate on what mysteries the unraveled tape and

smashed hard drives might still contain:

"Once you start looking at the materials, you start thinking

about all the information that went through some
of these parts and some of it is still buried there."

He says he was also impressed with how sturdy

some of the parts were, particularly in the older

computers that used more metal than plastic.

"The old ones were made like rocks. It's amazing."

Mr. Carter and the other artists involved in the show

have recycled obsolete technology to use it as art,

but he believes that people have to find something

else to do with it or some other way of recycling the

material in order to protect the environment.

"You just can't buy stuff and toss it way," he says. "I

keep trying to think of things that you could use

these great metal shells for. Probably, somewhere,

someone is already building a house out of the

interior metal parts that frame the outside of the hard drives."

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check out the New York Times artifle 'e-trash'
from January 27, 2006