There is something quietly radical about an artist who reaches not for paint or stone but for a floppy disk. Or a motherboard. Or a 3D printer loaded with translucent resin. In an era when technology is most often discussed in terms of what it can do — the images it can generate, the data it can process, the connections it can facilitate — a growing number of artists have turned their attention to what technology is: a physical object, with a material history, a cultural biography, and an inevitable obsolescence.
This is not a new impulse. Artists have been incorporating the detritus of industrial and technological culture into their work since at least the mid-twentieth century, from Robert Rauschenberg’s combines to Jean Tinguely’s kinetic machines. But the current moment has given this impulse a particular urgency. We are living through the fastest cycle of technological obsolescence in human history. The smartphone in your pocket will be outdated within two years. The laptop on your desk will be replaced within five. And somewhere at the end of that cycle — in a landfill in Ghana, in a recycling facility in India, in a drawer in a spare room — the physical remnants of our digital lives accumulate in quantities that are genuinely staggering. The world now generates more than 60 million tonnes of electronic waste every year . Artists who work with technology as material are, among other things, making that fact visible.
But the most interesting work in this space is not simply about environmental activism. It is about something more philosophically complex: the relationship between the physical and the digital, between the object and the data it once contained, between the human body and the machines it has made. The artists discussed in this article are not merely recycling technology; they are interrogating it — asking what it means to make something out of the materials of our information age, and what those materials reveal about who we are.
Nam June Paik and the Founding Gesture
Any account of artists working with technology as material must begin with Nam June Paik (1932–2006), the Korean-American artist who is widely credited as the father of video art and who spent five decades treating electronic technology — televisions, radios, video cameras, synthesisers — as his primary sculptural medium. Paik’s approach was not simply to use technology to make art; it was to treat technology itself as the subject of art, to take the objects that had come to define twentieth-century life and subject them to the kind of sustained aesthetic attention that had previously been reserved for marble and oil paint.
His Bakelite Robot (2002), now in the collection of Tate Modern, is characteristic: a miniature robot constructed from nine vintage Bakelite radios, with tiny television monitors placed where the dials would normally sit, displaying footage from science fiction films and recordings of vintage robot toys . The work is simultaneously a meditation on the history of consumer technology, a comment on the relationship between the human body and the machine, and a formal sculpture of considerable elegance. Paik described his aim as to “humanise the technology and the electronic medium” — a phrase that captures something essential about the project of treating technology as material: the goal is not to celebrate the machine but to bring it into a human scale, to make it answerable to human values and human questions.
Paik’s legacy is enormous, and it extends far beyond the artists who work explicitly in video or new media. The impulse to treat the physical remnants of technological culture as raw material for art — to see a floppy disk or a circuit board not as waste but as a potential carrier of meaning — is, in a real sense, a continuation of the gesture that Paik made when he first modified a television set in 1963.
Nick Gentry: The Archive of the Obsolete
Nick Gentry (b. 1980, London) is one of the most distinctive artists currently working with obsolete technology as material. A Central Saint Martins graduate, he has spent the past two decades building large-scale portraits from the physical remnants of our digital lives: floppy disks, VHS cassette tapes, film negatives, computer punch cards, medical X-rays . The resulting works are, on one level, formally striking — the grid of disks or tapes creates a richly textured surface that is both mechanical and organic, and the painted faces that emerge from this substrate have a quality of emergence, as if the human image is surfacing from beneath the data.
But Gentry’s work is also conceptually precise. The floppy disks he uses are not simply decorative elements; they are, he argues, “secret archives of human memory” — objects that once held data, that were once the primary medium through which people stored and shared information, and that now exist in a state of cultural redundancy . By painting portraits on these surfaces, Gentry creates a layered image: the human face overlaid on the technological object, the organic on the mechanical, the present on the recent past.
His 2023 series Skin Deep, shown at Robert Fontaine Gallery in Miami Beach, extended this inquiry into the territory of online identity. Working on painted backdrops of VHS tapes, Gentry depicted figures in grayscale, devoid of defining characteristics, with the tape’s plastic reels used to highlight their eyes. The effect is deliberately uncanny: the figures look like digital avatars, like profile pictures, like the kind of flattened, decontextualised images that circulate on social media. The work asks, with considerable formal intelligence, what happens to identity when it is mediated through technology — and what it means that the technology through which we once mediated our identities is now itself obsolete .
Gentry’s practice also has a collaborative dimension: he invites members of the public to donate their old floppy disks and other obsolete media, which he then incorporates into his work. The donated objects carry with them the traces of their previous owners — the labels, the handwriting, the specific software titles — and these traces become part of the finished work. The portrait is, in this sense, not just of the painted subject but of the collective history of the objects from which it is made.
Cory Arcangel: Hacking the Machine
Where Gentry works with the physical surface of obsolete technology, Cory Arcangel (b. 1978, Buffalo) works with its internal logic. A musician and artist trained at Oberlin Conservatory, Arcangel emerged in the early 2000s as one of the key figures in what would come to be known as Post-Internet Art — a practice that treats the internet and digital technology not as a novelty or a tool but as the fundamental condition of contemporary culture .
His landmark work Super Mario Clouds (2002) is a modified Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge from which Arcangel has removed all elements except the scrolling white clouds against a blue sky. Mario, the landscape, the enemies, the soundtrack — all gone. What remains is a minimalist, almost meditative loop that is simultaneously a piece of appropriation art, a comment on the aesthetics of early video games, and a meditation on what survives when the functional purpose of a technology is stripped away. The work is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it sits alongside the great works of American minimalism — a positioning that is entirely apt, since Super Mario Clouds is, among other things, a minimalist painting made from code .
Arcangel’s broader practice is characterised by a deep engagement with the aesthetics of technological failure and obsolescence. His Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations series (2008–ongoing) consists of large-scale C-prints created using only the default gradient tools in Adobe Photoshop, with the exact parameters documented in the work’s title. The pieces are formally beautiful — sweeping fields of colour that recall the colour field paintings of the 1960s — but their beauty is inseparable from their conceptual conceit: they are made from the most basic, most generic, most widely available tools in the most ubiquitous image-editing software in the world. The material is not paint but software; not canvas but pixels; not the artist’s hand but the default settings of a consumer application.
Morehshin Allahyari: 3D Printing as Resistance
Morehshin Allahyari (b. 1985, Iran) approaches technology as material from a very different angle. An Iranian-American artist, activist, and educator, Allahyari uses 3D modelling and 3D printing not as a means of producing novel aesthetic objects but as a tool for cultural preservation and political resistance .
Her series Material Speculation: ISIS (2015–2016) is one of the most significant works of the past decade in this space. In 2015, ISIS destroyed a series of ancient artefacts from the Roman-period city of Hatra and Assyrian artefacts from Nineveh in a series of highly publicised videos. Allahyari responded by using 3D modelling software to reconstruct twelve of the destroyed statues and printing them in translucent resin — a material that is simultaneously ancient in its formal references and emphatically contemporary in its production method. Inside each printed object, she embedded a flash drive and a memory card containing images, maps, PDF files, and videos related to the destroyed artefacts and sites .
The result is an object that is both a physical sculpture and a data archive — a time capsule, as Allahyari describes it, “for future civilisations.” The work is not simply a gesture of mourning or commemoration; it is a practical and political argument about the role of technology in cultural preservation. By making the files openly available for download and 3D printing, Allahyari transforms the work from a unique art object into a distributed archive — one that cannot be destroyed by any single act of violence because it exists in multiple copies, in multiple locations, in multiple formats.
Material Speculation: ISIS has been exhibited at the Biennale Architettura in Venice, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, among many other venues . In 2016, Allahyari was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers — a recognition that reflects the work’s significance not just as art but as a contribution to the broader conversation about technology, culture, and political violence.
The Broader Landscape: From E-Waste to Data Aesthetics
The artists discussed above represent very different approaches to the question of technology as material, but they share a common conviction: that the physical objects of our technological culture are not neutral or transparent, and that art is one of the most powerful means we have of making their significance visible.
This conviction is increasingly shared across the contemporary art world. Anicka Yi’s In Love With The World (2021), which filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with floating machines whose forms were based on ocean life and mushrooms, explored the merging of technology and biology in ways that were simultaneously beautiful and unsettling . Refik Anadol’s data sculptures — large-scale installations in which machine learning algorithms process vast datasets and render them as flowing, immersive visual forms — raise questions about the relationship between data and materiality that are among the most pressing of our moment. His Unsupervised (2022–2023) at MoMA, in which an AI system processed more than 200 years of the museum’s collection and rendered the results as a continuously evolving visual stream, was one of the most discussed works of recent years.
What connects these very different practices is a refusal to treat technology as simply a means to an end. For all of these artists, technology is not a tool for making art; it is the subject of art — an object of sustained aesthetic, critical, and philosophical attention. In a culture that tends to treat its technological objects as disposable, as mere instruments to be used and discarded, this is a genuinely counter-cultural position. It insists that the machines we make carry meaning, that the data we generate has weight, and that the obsolescence we engineer into our devices is not simply a commercial strategy but a cultural fact with consequences that extend far beyond the landfill.
FAQ
What is meant by “technology as material” in contemporary art?
The phrase refers to practices in which artists use the physical objects of technological culture — circuit boards, floppy disks, VHS tapes, 3D-printed components, modified software — as their primary sculptural or pictorial material, rather than using technology merely as a tool for making art in other media.
Who are the key artists working in this area?
The field is broad, but key figures include Nam June Paik (the founding figure of video art), Cory Arcangel (Post-Internet Art), Nick Gentry (obsolete media portraits), Morehshin Allahyari (3D printing and cultural preservation), Anicka Yi (technology and biology), and Refik Anadol (data sculpture and machine learning).
What is e-waste art?
E-waste art is a form of creative practice that uses discarded electronic components — motherboards, circuit boards, cables, screens, keyboards — as raw materials for sculpture and installation. It has grown significantly in recent years as awareness of the global e-waste crisis has increased, and encompasses both activist-oriented work and more formally focused practices.
What is Post-Internet Art?
Post-Internet Art is a term used to describe work made in a cultural context fully saturated by the internet and digital technology. Rather than treating the internet as a novelty or a subject, Post-Internet artists treat it as the fundamental condition of contemporary culture — the water in which all contemporary art swims. Key figures include Cory Arcangel, Hito Steyerl, and Amalia Ulman.
Why do artists work with obsolete technology?
Artists are drawn to obsolete technology for a range of reasons: its affordability, its cultural resonance, its capacity to carry traces of previous use, and its ability to make visible the accelerated cycle of technological obsolescence that characterises contemporary consumer culture. Obsolete technology is, in a sense, the fossil record of our digital age — and artists who work with it are, among other things, archaeologists of the recent past.