BIO
Darsha’s website boasts an interesting catalogue of DIY sound experiments with various forms of obsolete technology. Her work is interdisciplinary, spanning audio visual works, how to videos, structural installation and experimental performances with handmade machines. Sound remains as a central medium however. She uses these works to investigate into the values of our consumer based society that pays little attention to the hidden structures of past and current technologies. Materials we eventually brand as trash. It seems as if her aim is to expose consumer habit against capitalism in western culture, moving people to engage with their environment directly and personally.
I find Darsha’s approach fascinating and increasingly authentic with every experiment I look into. Unlike some of the other practitioners, I found her work self explanatory, shielded from misconceptions. Her designs carry the synonymity between consumption, society and sound, gracefully catalysing introspection into the way we live our lives without being too overt.
Her bottom up method when starting a project lent clarity to her process. Not starting on a concept but, instead letting an idea come to light through experimentation. This was intriguing as I often find a top down approach ultimately leads to superficiality in my work. One may struggle to find material that fits their initial agenda and in turn inadvertently use force or a tenuous connection to render a product meaningful. A way in which this bottom up technique is so elegantly portrayed is through her work with Old German Lawnmowers, namely the ‘DDR Rasenmaher Trolli.’
On Wikipedia, Media Archeology is described as the “insistence on the value of the obsolete and forgotten through new cultural histories.” In most of her work, Darsha explores this concept through reverse engineering. Evidence of this is shown in her research process for the aforementioned German Lawnmowers. Initially drawn to their aesthetic design she decided to take apart these defunct machines, made and used during socialist Germany in the 30s and 40s, to further inspect their design features. She dismantled the minimal looking, robust, helmet shaped cover that adorned these lawnmowers, eventually used as the central piece of her installation. Upon doing this she discovered that the apparatus had no motor in it and instead required a power drill to turn its rotor blade. When finding the user manual she found that it was often women demonstrating its uses. Further research into this showed that the company making the manuals graphic design also made political propaganda for the socialist state, where men and women were supposedly seen as equals. Other observations included notes found on the lawnmowers original packaging, stating that the boxes be returned to the state in order to be recycled and reused.
I find it crazy that this bottom up media archaeological dig reveals so much more than the anatomy of a lawnmower. Translating the context of society, when these were in use, into our present moment reveals so many flaws in how companies provide technologies and how not enough is done to educate consumers on the implication of their actions and the unsustainability of current trends.
A term she mentions in her lecture, called ‘Post-Growth Dilemma,’ outlines ‘the perception that, on a planet of finite resources, economies and populations cannot grow infinitely.’ Malthusian in nature, this statement is grounded in reality. How can we find different ways of repurposing discarded equipment in order reduce unnecessary waste. I feel though that in a way the limitations of using the allegedly unusable encourages creativity. Would we have made the same historical discoveries if it hadn’t been for planned obsolesence?
Planned obsolescence is a policy of planning or designing a product in industrial design in a way that gives it an artificially limited useful life, making it unfashionable or ‘obsolete’ after a given time, shortening the space in which it has to replaced for the benefit of capitalist economics.
In 2016 streaming and downloading music generated 194 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental cost of music definitely plays a big part in Darsha’s ethos and her work motivates us to pay more attention to the material infrastructure of sound.
One example in which she touches on this is her project ‘High Fidelity Wasteland 1: 100 Year Old Quicksilver cloud.’ Using a Cybertron, an old piece of technology used in industrial systems, she found it would produce electrons by heating up a puddle of mercury in the valve giving it a blue glow. She made recordings of the valve as it was heating up, using the sounds in collaboration with another artist to compose a sound piece. High pitched and eerie, it bring a sense of forebodingness when we ponder on how exactly these machines are disposed of and where does the mercury go afterwards?
From her work with rudimentary vinyl transducers using a tin can found in the garbage, electro static bells and the deconstruction of loud speakers she successfully demystifies many hidden processes, demonstrates the fetishisation of technology and exposes the immorality of capitalist culture, not only in relation to the environment but to the colonialism involved in certain extraction processes. Humans are inexorably related to the destruction and creation of the environment and I view Darsha’s work as an important starting point in the current Anthropocene to combatting consumerist culture.
References
“Darsha.” Darsha, 2021, darsha.org/about/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2021.
Valiquet, Patrick, and P Valiquet. “100% Expert!” Mastery and Equality in Darsha Hewitt’s Sideman 5000 Adventure. darsha.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/%E2%80%9C100-Expert%E2%80%9D-Mastery-and-Equality-in-Darsha-Hewitt%E2%80%99s-Sideman-5000-Adventure.pdf, 10.1007/978-3-030-39002-0_8.
Wikipedia Contributors. “Media Archaeology.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Dec. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_archaeology. Accessed 19 Jan. 2021.
—. “Planned Obsolescence.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Jan. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#:~:text=In%20economics%20and%20industrial%20design,period%20of%20time%20upon%20which. Accessed 19 Jan. 2021.
Udk-Berlin.De, 2021, www.udk-berlin.de/en/courses/sound-studies-and-sonic-arts-master-of-arts/faculty-staff/guest-faculty/darsha-hewitt/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2021.