Known for photo installations that group hundreds of hauntingly similar images sourced from the Internet (Suns from Sunsets from Flickr, for instance, or TVs from Craigslist), Penelope Umbrico turns her attention to the hardware of our digital age. Her gallery-filling installation, Monument, appears to be half e-waste warehouse, half nutty hobbyist’s basement lab. Echoes of her previous work appear on a flat screen propped against a wall, where a video splices together various still photos of televisions into what seems to be a moving image of a single rotating set with a rapidly changing background.
Forty-two busted flat screens in various sizes and states of disrepair form a wall in the center of the gallery. About half of them manage to play glitched fragments of cable news, a slyly appropriate choice of programming. Empty tinfoil husks once pressed over remote controls litter the floor, while the remotes themselves float above our heads on suspended glass shelves.
Though a gallery brochure tells us that the exhibition “aims to demystify the black-box” of our technology, the stacks, rows and heaps of disassembled flat screens and cellphones—as well as the vast table set up for visitors to bring in, break apart, and photograph their own outdated electronics—actually do nothing of the sort. Seeing our devices’ innards does little to explain their hold on us. As we seem to learn anew every day, corporate and even more nefarious players control the constantly refreshing content that controls us.