10. e-Waste Peep Show: A Research-Creation Project on the (In)visibility of Technological Waste

Lai-Tze Fan

The following chapter by Lai-Tze Fan is a critical and creative reflection that describes the research-creation project e-Waste Peep Show; or, on Seeing and not Wanting to be Seen (EWPS). Since research-creation as an academic practice challenges scholars to merge creative approaches in various disciplines and to apply theory to practice, it allows scholarship to address twenty-first-century issues in innovative ways. Constructed as an art installation, EWPS features original footage of an e-waste (electronic waste) plant in Northern Hong Kong through a peephole in its walls. The camera captures a masked woman taking apart mounds of technological trash. Suddenly, she throws technological debris at me: don’t look at me; don’t film here. In this chapter, the author describes the process of constructing the installation such that spectators can experience the act of peeping onto sites and sights that they are not ‘supposed’ to see. The three parts of the paper describe the fragments that came together to produce the research-creation project: first, the author discusses the toxicity of e-waste and the exploitation of e-waste labourers, with a focus on East, Southeast and South Asia; second, she describes the fieldwork that she completed in December 2017 to collect video footage at an e-waste plant in Hong Kong; third, she details the creation process of the installation and the intended experience for the spectator-as-user. In doing so, this chapter aligns creative methods in sustainable research with an ethical intervention into global technological consumerism.

e-Waste Peep Show; or, on Seeing and not Wanting to be Seen (EWPS) premiered as an art installation in 2018 at the multiple contingencies exhibition at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conference in Toronto, Canada. It is based on my findings from a research trip to an e-waste (electronic waste) plant in Northern Hong Kong. I shot original footage of the plant through a hole in its sheet metal walls, capturing a masked woman taking apart mounds of technological trash. The final installation projects this footage onto a screen, but this footage is only visible through a series of peepholes that I drilled into a corrugated plastic sheet wall. EWPS therefore tries to replicate the process of peeping onto sites and sights that we, media device users, are not ‘supposed’ to see: sights of invisible, dirty and corrupt practices in technological consumerism and consumption.

The Politics and Ethics of e-Waste and e-Waste Labour

The term ‘e-waste recycling’ is presented as an ethical and even sustainable alternative to throwing away old, broken and otherwise unwanted electronic devices. As a global focus on natural resources surmounts—whether the focus is on the difficulty of acquiring or making these resources, on humans’ overreliance upon them, or on models of sustainable futures in spite of diminishing resources—media users are becoming more aware of where their devices come from and where they go after they are done using them. For instance, countless editorial features have stressed the difficulty of mining the mineral coltan in an ethical way, with a high percentage of coltan coming from the Republic of Congo specifically. The Washington Post¹ and The New York Times² have documented the use of exploitative labour in coltan mining in Congo, even through the employment of children. Meanwhile, coltan is needed in all lithium-ion batteries, found in laptops, smart phones and electric cars, and conversations about sustainability present lithium-ion batteries as a responsible form of energy use when compared to disposable batteries and natural gas and petrol.

The incentive to participate in e-waste recycling is high for many Western consumers, who are now told that it is a good and sustainable practice. Major technological companies promote e-waste recycling programs, such as Apple’s ‘Trade In’ program that is intent on salvaging older Apple devices for ‘free recycling’, meanwhile offering a trade-in credit that consumers can use towards purchasing a new device.³ Apple’s website states of the Trade In program: ‘You may be done with your device, but chances are it still has more to give. If it’s in good shape, we’ll help it go to a new owner. If not, we’ll send it to our recycling partner, so we can save more precious minerals and take less from the earth’.⁴ Elsewhere the website notes: ‘If it’s not eligible for credit, we’ll recycle it for free. No matter the model or condition, we can turn it into something good for you and good for the planet’.⁵ What Apple neglects to highlight is the fact that the precious minerals are resold in the form of their new devices. While it is indeed a positive practice to take fewer natural resources from the earth, it is worthwhile to trace what happens to e-waste after it is traded in, how it is properly or improperly treated, and who is doing that post-consumption labour of disposal or repurposing.

E-waste recycling is costly to do in a safe environment, as it is toxic if not handled with the proper equipment and training for human labourers. Therefore, much of the work of recycling through taking apart devices and essentially re-mining them for precious minerals such as gold, silver and copper is outsourced to poor labourers in parts of East, Southeast and South Asia—a veritable network of unseen hands in invisible spaces.

In her article, ‘E-Waste Hazard: The Impending Challenge’,⁶ Violet N. Pinto offers some context into these labourers and their exposure to e-waste, noting that ‘most of the people working in this recycling sector are the urban poor with very low literacy levels and hence very little awareness regarding the hazards of e-waste toxins’.⁷ Sometimes working without face masks, gas masks, proper ventilation or even gloves, labourers are exposed to common toxic materials such as lead and mercury. They are also exposed to lesser known toxic materials such as cadmium (used in electric and rechargeable batteries), which causes long-term cumulative poisoning, especially in the kidneys, and to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH; distributed into the air through burning coal and other biofuels), which causes cancers of the lungs, skin and bladder.⁸ While Pinto offers a comprehensive information chart on the general health problems of e-waste recycling labourers, she adds in necessary context that her facts are derived from studies on male labourers and therefore do not yet account for the women and children in this area of labour, of which there is a high percentage.

In the global technocultural circuit, the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong plays a major role due to its status as a global financial hub as well as its proximity to China’s technological epicentre, Shenzhen. In the area of e-waste, the mega city of Hong Kong has, in Rolien Hoyng’s description, ‘become a site where imported e-waste accumulates and lingers’, owing to changed regulations and e-waste governance in mainland China.⁹

While mainland China forbade e-waste devices from being transported into the country without being taken apart into smaller components, just outside of its borders is Hong Kong, which now serves as a main Asian Pacific location for e-waste recycling. From 2017–2018, I was an Assistant Professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where I joined the Open Repair e-waste group at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. One activity in this group’s work was to visit e-waste plants in the Northern region of Hong Kong, close to the border of Shenzhen, and this we did together in December 2017, as part of an organized conference at Lingnan University, ‘Digital Media and Borders: Infrastructures, Mobilities, and Practices across Asia and Beyond’.

Fieldwork and Footage

On a school bus, we drove to a location that looked like a landfill of technology, with computer screens collapsed into each other like folded cardboard boxes, bound up in twine (see Fig. 1). The dirt road was littered with trash that had been blown off to the sides by passing vehicles, and two stray dogs wandered slowly a hundred feet from us. Their fur was dirty and matted, their bodies thin and their eyes cautious (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 1 A pile of e-waste at an e-waste plant in Northern Hong Kong, December 2017. Photograph by Lai-Tze Fan.

Fig. 2 Stray dogs wander around the e-waste plant, December 2017. Photograph by Lai-Tze Fan.

The reason we had come was for that which we could not see: an e-waste plant hidden behind sheet metal walls that had been hammered into the ground, forming a long barricade wall. Someone had spray painted the traditional Chinese words for ‘stop’ (停) and ‘leave’ or ‘go away’ (走) every few feet (see Fig. 3). No one knew where the entrance was, and we would not seek it, as we were there to witness from the outside, or to listen. On the other side of the wall were sounds of deconstruction. There was the occasional high-pitched electric drill, unwinding screws from a device. We could hear people—their mouths silent, their feet pitter pattering—scraping metal against metal. A short while later, we heard the sound of crashes, as objects collided in a heap.

Fig. 3 Signs warn us to keep away (here, they say STOP), December 2017. Photograph by Lai-Tze Fan.

Fig. 4 Our approximate location in Hong Kong, December 2017. Photograph by Lai-Tze Fan. Map data: Google, 2017.

Our guide spoke during all of this, explaining why were in the boonies and close to farmland: there was ample space, unlike the rest of Hong Kong, and we were far away from prying eyes. We had driven so far North in Hong Kong that we neared the Chinese border that would lead us to the technological epicentre of China—Shenzhen—into and out of which transportation flowed (see Fig. 4). We listened and wandered, taking photos and videos, talking quietly amongst each other, and wondering if the people on the other side (who were they?) could hear us.

In the sheet metal walls, I noticed a few perfectly symmetrical holes the size of green peas and brought my eyes to one. It was difficult to see—the hole was too small to even peer through—but I did make out a mound of technological scrap in front of me, pushed up against the wall. I brought my cell phone camera to the hole, and through my screen, I could make out a person wearing bright yellow who stood in front of the heap and handled something before them at waist height. A few moments later, I double tapped on my phone screen to focus in on the image and I saw her more clearly: an East or Southeast Asian woman in a bright yellow raincoat, her black hair gathered back under a fisherman’s hat and her face hidden behind a thin blue mask—the kind worn by medical professionals. The mask would not protect her from the fumes let off of the devices. She wore ill-fitting gloves to take apart what looked like a desktop CPU, tossing the odd fragment or cluster of wires at the mound of technological trash before her, between us—a giant pile of e-waste. I didn’t know if she heard us or perhaps heard my footsteps stop in front of her, but suddenly, she threw a long metal strip in my direction.

Don’t look at me. Don’t record here.

Creation of the Installation

In my art piece e-Waste Peep Show, I have tried to replicate the experience of watching the labouring woman behind the wall, including the trespassing, the atmosphere, the structures and the act of peeping at someone who is not meant to be seen and who also does not want to be seen.

I took inspiration from an existing art project, Marcel Duchamp’s last major work, Étant donnés,¹⁰ translated to Given. This piece features a wooden door in front of a statue of a naked woman laying on her back, holding a candle and surrounded by twigs. In the background is a landscape collage of greenery. To experience the piece and receive its content, a spectator peers into a peephole, seeing the woman in the foreground, against the landscape. The piece might be described as fetishistic, and in following Duchamp’s other works that renew spectators’ consideration of capitalism, we could call Étant donnés a critical piece on consumption practices. To view the woman involves the spectator’s engaging in an act that objectifies her body and turns it into something to consume. Put another way, the act of voyeuristic or forbidden peeping is simultaneously the act of objectifying that which is seen and the act of consuming the resulting object.

The act of peeping may also be compared to the male gaze as described in critical film studies, a similar process in which the camera’s—and by extension, the spectator’s—eye fragments the on-screen woman’s body into consumable, sexualized parts such as the legs, breasts or lips.¹¹ The woman may know that she is being looked at or she may not, but either way, her agency is suspended by the gaze and her identity is abstracted into parts over a whole.

I didn’t want to in any way repeat the violence of this potential gaze in filming the labouring woman, and I realized that her labouring body represented a similar fragmentation and abstraction. This woman played a part in the lifecycle of devices, some stages of which are socially discussed and highlighted (design, distribution and consumption) and some of which (extraction and disposal) are horrifying reminders of the conditions encountered by exploited people in the Global South. Their experiences are too harsh for the sterile, user-friendly message of media, and so, they are cast out of sight, out of mind.

I wanted to avoid treating this labouring woman as an object of consumption through her role in the life cycle of devices as well as through capturing her for content in a recorded video (see Fig. 5). While I had received ethical research clearance for my fieldwork, and while it was my intention to foreground her individuality, I also did not have her expressed permission to capture her image for consumption, and thus, to see her at work felt forbidden—an act of peeping that fragments the Other into object. Because she could not speak to me—even the words above are projected through her gestures—I worried about how to view her in any way that afforded her agency.

Fig. 5 The woman filmed from behind the peephole, December 2017. Photograph by Lai-Tze Fan.

The problematic practice of fetishism that abstracts the whole in favour of the parts also runs deep in the dominant logic of technological infrastructure, owing to the sociocultural design and aesthetic illusion of media immateriality, which is described by media scholars such as Rita Raley¹² and Lori Emerson.¹³ For instance, Emerson focuses on Apple, arguing that the brand’s notion of:

user-friendly[ness] is used quite deliberately to distort reality by convincing users that this very particular notion of a user-friendly device—one that depends on and then celebrates the device as entirely closed off both to the user and to any understanding of it via a glossy interface—is the only possible version of the user-friendly, one that claims to successfully bridge the gap between human and computer. In reality, the glossy surface of the interface further alienates the user from having access to the underlying workings of the device.¹⁴

Similarly, Olia Lialina explores the logic of interface design as one that deliberately misdirects from media materiality. She quotes a 2012 iPad trailer: ‘We believe technology is at its very best when it’s invisible, when you’re conscious only of what you’re doing, not the device you’re doing it with. An iPad is the perfect expression of that idea. It’s just this magical pane of glass that can become anything you want it to be […] It’s a more personal experience with technology than people have ever had’.¹⁵

Like other ultra-cool technology companies, Apple’s promise of advanced technology is undergirded by a rhetoric of perpetual newness, which results in the idealization of and cultural preference for newer media devices.¹⁶ Insofar as the newer device is always already anticipated in the production line, the consumption of newness for the sake of newness is a condition of contemporary post-industrial capitalism that has no time for older models, let alone ‘old’ media. The doing away with older media also does violence, as the old is unwanted and shipped off to parts of the world where consumers no longer have to seen them. This model of perpetual newness, however, is utterly unsustainable.

In thinking of how e-Waste Peep Show could encourage sustainable practices while resisting a rhetoric of perpetual newness, I needed to negotiate the politics of the labour that keeps the technocapital machine running, as well as how to responsibly represent it. How, I wondered, could I receive the image of the woman labourer and represent her in a way that did not reinforce my role as a consumer who exploits the Other or that abstracts them as an object? How could I discourage others from participating in ignorant consumption practices in Western societies? How could I renew the role of the user, moving away from socially unjust practices that discard Others and objects out of sight, out of mind?

Toward a research-creation project that is framed by these questions, e-Waste Peep Show is mindful of the receiver of the project (as additionally a media user and a consumer). It seeks to defamiliarize the receiver’s experience of the consumption of objects, subjects and images that are circulated by technological infrastructure. For e-Waste Peep Show, I sought to defamiliarize e-waste and garbage by making them visible. Upon approaching the installation, it does not look like art, but rather, like literal garbage. For its premiere at the multiple contingencies exhibition,¹⁷ I was assisted in setting up the installation by curator Belinda Kwan and assistant Bertha Lee. We ‘decorated’ the site with stacks of cardboard boxes and littered the space with obsolete media, including non-digital media such as rotary phones and dead batteries, as well as digital media such as lithium-ion batteries, broken laptops and the computer servers that had once been in the cardboard boxes (see Fig. 6). We swept leaves and twigs around the site to evoke the now-naturalized mix of trash and nature that is in the urban outdoors.

Fig. 6 Curator Belinda Kwan at the first installation of e-Waste Peep Show, November 2018. Photograph by Lai-Tze Fan.

All of the media objects and boxes were borrowed from the storage spaces of our exhibition site at OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design), Toronto, Canada. The servers, I was told, had been purchased five years before (2013) and were now out of use, as a new model had been invented and ordered. While I only featured two physical servers in the installation, we used all of the empty boxes, which in total, represented $1.5 million CAD in e-waste. One of my particular foci was to foreground the project’s ‘glocalization’, a term that describes local problems, practices and techniques that maintain consideration of global contexts, societies, politics and futures. ‘Glocality’ is therefore an apt framework to think about how e-waste found on the OCAD campus could represent e-waste generated in the city of Toronto, and by extension, the participation of large cities such as Toronto in a global technocapital circuit.

The installation, again, looked like a pile of garbage that did not even belong in the exhibition. In truth, many visitors originally walked past the installation, not recognizing it as an art piece. In response, I placed speakers behind the boxes to loop loud sounds of construction, and it was this noise that invited visitors to take a second look and to understand this aesthetically displeasing and uncomfortable pile of garbage as a deliberate production (see Fig. 7).

Fig. 7 The completed installation of e-Waste Peep Show, November 2018. Photograph by Lai-Tze Fan.

I screened the footage so that it played behind large, dirty sheets of corrugated plastic that were spray painted in a similar manner as the original e-waste plant. I drilled tiny holes into the sheets at varying heights to allow spectators to peep inside. The experience is one of watching someone who is doesn’t want to be looked at—a forbidden feeling that hopefully repeats the process of negotiation that I first went through at the e-waste plant in Hong Kong. In particular, drawing upon the experience of Étant donnés, I wanted the spectator to confront the unseen or not-to-be-seen in a way that makes more transparent their own viewing practice as a violent consumption practice.

In another version of EWPS, the installation was re-created at Rutgers University, Camden campus, in New Jersey, USA. In April 2019, Rutgers-Camden’s Digital Studies Center hosted a Digital Ephemera Conference (now an annual event) on the topic of ‘Trash’, and I proposed to discuss and re-create EWPS to compliment the Center’s efforts in re-thinking objects’ original conditions. The theme of ‘Trash’ in particular begs the reconsideration of media objects beyond their original contexts, use-values, intended audiences and users, and accessibilities.

The project became a collaborative effort. The conference organizers generously sectioned off the end of the conference as a workshop period for all participants to focus on the construction of EWPS, starting by splitting up conference participants into four work groups that represented stages of media objects’ lifecycles: excavation, production, consumption and disposal. Led by myself as well as young scholars at the University of Waterloo—Dr. Phil Miletic, Dr. Jason Lajoie and Megan Honsberger—these groups challenged participants to confront physical media artifacts according to their work group, asking critical questions about otherwise familiar technological objects and their sustainability, ethics and wastefulness. We then gathered around a screen on which my footage of the masked woman was being projected, collectively constructing a wall around the screen with the artifacts from each group. It was an exercise in mindful, engaged making.

Sustainability sounds great on paper, but its execution necessitates so much more awareness on the part of the consumer, as the practice of responsible consumption continues to be a global challenge. What is needed is transparency of the term ‘e-waste recycling’, which, while seemingly sustainable, is not as effective as sustainable action at the stage of production. That is, the most effective point of social intervention and responsible action is before resources are excavated in the first place. The point of using obsolete media in e-Waste Peep Show was to offer an alternative form of e-waste recycling, where instead of breaking down devices to be resold into the capital circuit, materials and devices could be used for creating greater awareness of the capital circuit, completing the picture of what comes before production and after consumption. I will continue to re-build e-Waste Peep Show as an ongoing, travelling project, the objective of which is to demonstrate to spectators their own complicity in what are absolutely unsustainable practices. Confronted with the residue of their own technological consumption, spectators must therefore consider how to avoid fetishizing media devices—including the labour that produces, promotes and processes these devices, as these devices also produce and process so much waste.

Bibliography

Apple, ‘Apple trade in’, Apple, https://www.apple.com/ca/trade-in/

Emerson, Lori, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

Fan, Lai-Tze, e-Waste Peep Show; or, on Seeing and not Wanting to be Seen, 15–18 November, 2008, installation at the Multiple Contingencies exhibition, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference, Toronto.

Hoyng, Rolien, ‘Logistic of the accident: E-waste management in Hong Kong’, in Logistical Asia: The Labor of Making a World Region, ed. by Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter and Ranabir Samaddar (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), pp. 199–220.

Kasinof, Laura, ‘An Ugly Truth behind ‘Ethical Consumerism’’, The Washington Post (April 19, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/19/conflict-free/?utm_term=.86540fcdca75

Kristof, Nicholas, ‘Death by gadget’, The New York Times (June 26, 2010), https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27kristof.html

Lialina, Olia, ‘Not Art & Tech’, in Across & Beyond: A transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, & Institutions, ed. by Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing, Jussi Parikka, and Elvia Wilk (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), pp. 135–145.

Liu, Alan, The Laws of Cool (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1973), 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6

Pinto, Violet N., ‘E-waste hazard: The impending challenge’, in Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, ed. by Jussi Parikka (London: Open Humanities Press, 2011), n.p., http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures

Raghavan, Sudarsan, ‘How a well-intentioned U.S. law left Congolese miners jobless’, The Washington Post (November 30, 2014), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae 742a2_story.html?utm_term=.139024bca33a

Raley, Rita, Tactical Media (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).