Material Thinking on Material Excess:
Michelle Cieloszczyk’s Oxidized Macbook
written by Adrienne Scott


_When computers break, they often break dramatically: My own late 2015 iMac flashes horizontal glitches of artificial colour whenever I try to use updated versions of photoshop. An older, long-suffering laptop that predates this had an ominous dark ‘screen burn’ in the centre of the display from having overheated. Apple’s own online FAQs attest to the fallibility of their devices – when I was writing this essay, and was searching for the title of the piece Oxidized Macbook to call up Michelle Cieloszczyk’s artist website, the first hits on google were for help forums addressing oxidation within Macbooks from liquid spills.

_Cieloszczyk’s piece isn’t the result of a spill so much as it is the product of a pour: Oxidized Macbook is a plaster casting of the artist’s own broken laptop, speckled with iron filings which forge a weathered patina. The sculpture looks old, and intentionally so - its appearance sits in contrast to the typical clean lines and matte metallic finish that make Apple devices such coveted consumer objects. Cieloszczyk’s piece is a fractured copy as the top and corners of the plaster screen are missing, reminiscent of re-constructed earthenware vessels from an archeological dig. The iron filings suspended in the plaster have also pooled on the reverse side of the apple logo, like a physical after-image caught within the sculpture. Oxidized Macbook’s surface is tactile, but the keyboard and hinge are cemented in a permanently fixed position. You could almost make a grave rubbing of the QWERTY keyboard.

_Old things have a kind of mystery attached. When we look at cultural artefacts in a museum, we’re prompted to think about those artefacts’ past uses and users. Oxidized Macbook’s users are contemporary, even if as an art object it seems to exist as a relic from a speculative future. The place of electronics in the future is contentious – while science-fiction images made in the 20th century predicted optimistic leaps forward in communication technology and virtual space (see: Star Trek) the attitude towards the future and its technologies in the 21st century is cautious if not outright nihilistic when faced with evidence-based predictions of climate disaster. Among the things that came to mind when I first looked at Oxidized Macbook was a scene from the novel Station Eleven written by Emily St John Mandel and published in 2014. The novel (which made the rounds in the early COVID-19 pandemic for its own post-pandemic setting) closely examines the bleak hardships of global catastrophe, and the desire to carry forward the best of the ‘before times’. Notably, survivors of the novel’s pandemic who get stuck in a small airport start to collect their defunct electronics and old-world objects in a makeshift ‘Museum of Civilization’:


“Clark placed his useless iPhone on the top shelf...Beside it, Lily Patterson’s driver’s license. Clark took these artifacts back to the Skymiles Lounge and laid them side by side under the glass. They looked insubstantial there, so he added his laptop, and this was the beginning of the Museum of Civilization. He mentioned it to no one, but when he came back a few hours later, someone had added another iPhone, a pair of five-inch red stiletto heels, and a snow globe.” (Mandel, 230)


_It can be a nostalgic thing to collect objects that have outlived their usefulness, and to commemorate their presence and physical exterior in casting. This impulse extends far beyond an artistic gesture, as it used to be common to cast baby shoes in pewter as a familial keepsake of early childhood. On the other end of this is the now-archaic practice of casting death-masks from the faces of the recently deceased. We expect objects to keep traces of our own memories, even if the object in question is transcribed into a new material. The memory of tech devices is literal too, in that ‘computer memory’ is stored in the hardware of a given device, and this memory must be backed up and copied to keep its place within successive devices.

_Cieloszczyk’s casting disrupts the sentimentality of making a commemorative copy, in the substitution of hypermodern alloys for porous plaster. While Cieloszczyk doesn’t claim to comment on the anthropocenic issue of tech pollution, citing the contradiction that a sculpture practice creates its own waste, Cieloszczyk’s interest in consumer discards presents us with the fact that as we gaze into the virtual depths of a typical glass screen we’re also looking at materials: aluminium; glass; plastic; liquid crystal. While our current devices contain infinities in the width of half a centimeter, this infinity has a lifespan. With Oxidized Macbook, we’re reminded that the objects of our technocratic present engineer the future’s precarity.





Sources:
Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.