The fireplace was the hearth of the home, a place of gathering and communion. It functioned as a necessity for warmth and cooking, while providing a space for intimacy, discussion, and idea creation. Since the advent of central heating, inglenooks have been sealed off and abandoned. This former centerpiece has commonly been replaced with large televisions in the contemporary home. Generations is an installation of anthropomorphized old cell phones living out their days without us. I was looking at and admiring the design of old phones and how they have changed over the years – incredible functional individual objects made irrelevant by changes to the networks and operating systems that surround them. In the United States about 350,000 old cell phones are discarded every day, 5.3 billion phones per year across the world, 169 phones per second, making them one of, if not the fastest growing form of electronic waste in the world. Every year a new generation of phones is released, and every day the old are discarded.

 

Generations playfully asks larger questions of aging, consumerism, technology, and environmental stewardship in our modern world.