2024-12-27 –, Saal ZIGZAG
Language: English
We built an Ethical Hardware Kit with a PCB microcontroller made of wild clay retrieved from the forest in Austria and fired on a bonfire. Our conductive tracks use urban-mined silver and all components are re-used from old electronic devices. The microcontroller can compute different inputs and outputs and is totally open source.
It is an open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains not only plastics but also ‘conflict minerals’ such as copper and gold. Technology is not neutral. We investigate alternative hardware from locally sourced materials from a feminist perspective, to develop and speculate upon renewable practices. We call it Feminist Hardware! Feminist Hardware is developed without mining in harmful ways, in an environmentally friendly way, under fair working conditions, and is manufactured from ubiquitously available materials, without generating e-waste, with consent, love and care.
We researched on fair-traded, ethical, biodegradable hardware for environmental justice, building circuits that use ancient community-centered crafts encouraging de-colonial thinking, market forces to be disobeyed, and future technologies to be imagined. Our artistic outcome is an Ethical Hardware Kit with a PCB microcontroller at its core. Our PCB is made of wild clay retrieved from the forest in Austria and fired on a bonfire. Our conductive tracks used urban-mined silver and all components are re-used from old electronic devices. The microcontroller can compute different inputs and outputs and is totally open source.
Patrícia J. Reis (b. Lisbon, PT) is an installation and media artist based in Vienna, Austria, whose practice spans diverse formats and media to critically explore human-machine interactions in times of advanced automation, extractivism, and post-colonialism. Her work destabilizes the boundaries between science, technology, and belief systems through speculative methodologies that pose questions such as “How do we believe in machines?”,“How can we redefine agency and consent in human-machine relationships?”, “How do technology reflect and reproduce human power dynamics, and how can we challenge this?” and “How is technology shaping us bodily?”.
Challenging the dominance of visuality as the primary mode of experience, Reis employs technology to expand and stimulate corporeal perception, inviting viewers into multi-sensory explorations. Inspired by media theory and cybernetics, Reis draws parallels between human and machine behaviour—examining systems, programs, and automatism—while playfully engaging with the human body’s own sensory mechanisms as a “black box”.
Grounded in the premise that there is no “software without hardware,” her work is informed by feminist hardware, eco-feminism, and feminist hacking, employing new materialist perspectives, aiming to contribute to the decolonisation of technology through speculative art and design practices.
Reis studied Painting at ESAD (Caldas da Rainha, PT, 2004), Media Art at Lusófona University (Lisbon, PT, 2011), and holds a Ph.D. in Art from the University of Évora (PT, 2016).
Currently, she is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher and recipient of the Elise Richter Program Grant (PEEK) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, AT (2023–2027), leading the artist-based research project “Hacking the Body as the Black Box”. Since 2015, she has also been lecturing in the university’s Digital Arts Department.
Since 2012, Reis has been a board member of Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory*, a feminist hackerspace in Vienna, AT, where she curates exhibitions and collaboratively creates and researches on interactive installations at the intersection of art, gender, science, and open-source technology.
Stefanie Wuschitz (AT) is an arts-based researcher in the field of media art investigating strategies to decolonise technology.
Her publications evolve around feminist hacking, queering and demythification of hardware. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened at international venues such as Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), ART|JOG 8 (Indonesia), Bouillants Vern-Sur-Seich (France), Austrian Cultural Forum (United States), 8th International Sinop Biennale (Turkey), 16th International Biennial of Aveiro (Portugal) among others.
She had solo exhibitions at Kunstraum pro arte, Galerie 3 and solo exhibitions with her former artist collective Mz* Baltazar’s Lab at Kunstraum pro arte, VBKÖ, Forum Alpbach and Medienwerkstatt Vienna among others.
She is currently principal investigator of a project on Digital Colonialism in Indonesia affiliated to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.