Ben Gaulon: Corrupt.Yourself

Focusing on limits and failures of information and communication technologies, Paris-based artist Ben Gaulon re-purposes electronic devices in order to explore new strategies for e-waste recycling. Gaulon looks to themes of planned obsolescence, consumerism in disposable societies, and notions of ownership and privacy to frame his interactive installations and web-based works.

In his solo exhibition, Corrupt.Yourself, Gaulon presents three projects that investigate the “glitch” as a way to engage with forms of material and digital disruptions. His ongoing project KindleGlitched, is a series of defunct Kindles that are donated, found or purchased through eBay, and then signed by the artist and resold on Amazon. In ReFunct Modular, Gaulon, along with Karl Klomp, Tom Verbruggen and Gijs Gieskes, create modules comprised of found e-waste materials strung together through custom-made connectors that share power, audio signal, video signal and spare lines. For the center work, Corrupt.Yourself, Gaulon collaborated with the artist Martial Geoffe-Rouland to create a single-channel video of clips from uglitch.com.

Corrupt.Yourself aestheticizes digital errors, highlighting the complex and unexpected beauty of malfunction also found in ReFunct Modular and KindleGlitched. Through these projects, Gaulon does not propose answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, the exhibition experiments with and explores the unchallenged possibilities of how so-called obsolete electronic and digital media impact our relationship with technologies and consumption.

About the Artist

Benjamin Gaulon is an artist, researcher and art college lecturer who has previously released work under the name “Recyclism.” He is currently Associate Professor at The New School Parsons Paris, where he is the program director of the MFA Design + Technology and the BFA AMT (Art, Media and Technology). In addition, Gaulon is a member of the Graffiti Research Lab in France and has been lecturer at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, associate researcher at CTVR/the telecommunications research center at Trinity College, and director of Data 2.0 (Dublin Art and Technology Association). Since 2005 he has been leading workshops and giving lectures in Europe and US about e-waste and hardware Hacking/Recycling. In 2011 he created the Recyclism Hacklab , a collaborative workspace focused on contemporary DIY and hacking practices. Within this multidisciplinary space he facilitates and teaches both workshops and mentoring sessions in physical computing, hardware hacking and 3D printing