A Season of snarls

A big shout-out to the recycling staffer at my local Return-It depot who painstakingly went through a bin full of snarls of computer cables to select the ones with the most colourful clusters of wire for me.

I find it tough to march right into these kind of dirty, noisy man places but a girl’s gotta do what she needs to do for her art. And I needed some cables to macrame for an upcoming show.

I’m in love with cable wire because it almost vibrates with the culture of our times and can be used in place of and in reference to traditional fibers. It’s in overabundance (wireless home – hah!) and really pretty.

But to get it you’ve got to do some shucking. And this is how I came to spend many of these past fine days decapitating each, uh, connector-plug thing, skinning the plastic conduit with an X-acto knife, pulling away insulating woven aluminum or cellophane wraps and bundling the colourful clusters into skeins. (Below: before and after.)

I can’t resist mixing traditional fiber arts with industrial materials as a starting point and letting the materials kind of take over, shaping concepts. Sure, you could make a few bracelets or wrap a few light fixtures with the stuff but the power of the mountains of those wires, cables, old plastic laptops and toxic dead rechargeable batteries resonates with issues of globalization, environmental hazard, over-work and over-connectedness. Yum!

No surprise that there is an emerging — no, burgeoning — genre of sculptural and installation work that uses tossed computer bits to evoke those themes.

Below left, Democratic Republic of Congo artist Maurice Mbikayi‘s “Anti-social Network I” is one in a series of works that attempts to grapple with his “digital demons.” Below right,  it took Polish sculptor Marek Tomasik three years to install an enclosure composed of old computer parts in a 14th Century castle in Poland.