In his book Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (2017), interface designer and cultural critic Adam Greenfield writes: “We need to understand ourselves as nervous systems that are virtually continuous with the world beyond the walls, fused to it through the juncture of our smartphones.” Our increasing dependence on digital forms of connection has a price, of course, resulting in, for instance, vast amounts of electronic waste. Jean Shin made this reality strikingly visible in “Pause” (2020), an installation at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco for which she turned thousands of discarded phones, laptops, hard drives, and cables into a sculptural landscape.
