Over the past five years, Dani Ploeger has been investigating interactions between human bodies and technological consumer goods, ranging from brand-new objects of desire in shopping malls, to the debris of discarded electronic devices on dumps and recycling sites. His performances and objects explore and subvert the expectations and dreams surrounding everyday technologies through an engagement with their materialness in connection to the body. He programmed an iPad app that is operated with the tongue (Festish, 2014) and had parts of an old television installed in his abdomen by a bodypiercer in Recycled Coil (2014).
© Marco Berardi
In 2014 Dani started a research project called Bodies of Planned Obsolescence: Digital performance and the global politics of electronic waste. As part of this project, he travelled to Lagos (Nigeria), Hong Kong and London together with a group of performance artists, cultural theorists and scientists from Nigeria, the UK, the Netherlands and the US. In each of these locations, the participants of the project took part in electronic waste recycling work for several days. These experiences formed the basis for some of his artworks : Charging (2014-2015), where tablet computers wrapped in sheet metal are left to charge forever, Hi-Tech Wound (2015) that shows a magnified infected wound that documents the aftermath of the artist’s participation in electronic waste recycling on a Nigerian dump site and VIRT1210 (iPad mini).
