It is an open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains not only plastics but also conflict minerals such as copper and gold. Technology is not neutral. The artists investigate alternative hardware from locally sourced materials, from a feminist perspective, to develop and speculate upon renewable practices. They call it ‘feminist hardware’! Feminist hardware is developed: without mining in harmful ways, under fair working conditions, and manufactured from ubiquitously available materials, without generating e-waste, with consent, love, and care. The duo researched fair-traded, ethical, biodegradable hardware for environmental justice, building circuits that use ancient community-centred crafts encouraging de-colonial thinking, market forces to be disobeyed, and future technologies to be imagined. The artistic outcome is an ‘ethical hardware kit’ with a PCB microcontroller at its core. This PCB is made of wild clay retrieved from the forest in Austria and fired on a bonfire. Their conductive tracks used urban-mined silver and all components are re-used from old electronic devices. The microcontroller can compute different inputs and outputs and is totally open- source.

Credits
Scientific Research/Concept: Patrícia J. Reis, Taguhi Torosyan, & Stefanie Wuschitz
PCB Design: Patrícia J. Reis & Daniel Schatzmayr
3D Printing: Klemens Kohlweis
Clay Manufacturing & Research: Patrícia J. Reis
Wooden Frames: Stefanie Wuschitz

Clay PCB is supported by The Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and Academy…of Fine Arts, Vienna. 

Clay, conductive silver ink, ATMEGA chip, upcycled electronic parts, upcycled magnets | 2024