Tablets is an onging series of concrete casts taken from old cathode ray tube televisions by applying concrete to their screens, like death masks. The cast surfaces were grey, textured and concave instead of convex. I hoped to invite a different new way of looking at these obsolete media objects, making them strange. In this documentation shot they are left on the corner of a street, but they have also been exhibited inside gallery spaces.

Making Tablets led me to my current PhD research. As I was interested in the different shapes of the screens, buttons, speaker grills, volume sliders and casings of the monitors, I found out that releasing the concrete from the glass was a process of trial and error. As a result I rapidly ended up needing more old televisions. My search brought me to an electronic recycling centre at the city limit of Amsterdam. Here I found a whole shipping container full of discarded televisions, but I also encountered people working in between heaps and stacks of discarded media equipment. They were busy sorting cables, disassembling computers, stacking containers, and prying batteries out of plastic casings. The visit gave me a first insight into the extent to which people are involved at the end of the production chain. I decided to investigate this further by working as a recycler myself and contacted a recycling centre in the Netherlands to ask if they had a place for me. The process I initiated with the old televisions was meant for making sculptures but changed into situated research. A description of the research project can be found here.