We Talked With The Artist Mangling Smartphones And Warping Laptops Into Abstract Sculptures

Hardware? Beautiful? Never. Spiros Hadjidjanos is a Berlin-based artist working to make technology beautiful again. A sculptor-meets-new media artist, Hadjidjanos creates elegantly-crafted ethernet cable sculptures, bizarre laptop installations, 3D alumide prints, and more. All in all, he immortalizes the swipe of smartphones and the snapshot of screengrabs.

He recently mounted a piece in the freight elevator of CA2M in Spain called The Performativity of Things and just released a book called Photographic Objects. Next up, he’s working towards a show upcoming at Future Gallery in May, where he’ll be showing monochromatic ethernet sculptures and phone prints.

Hadjidjanos has played with ultraviolet prints on carbon fiber plates, which gives his pieces the vibe of looking like magnets come to life. Meanwhile, some of his other work includes videos, green-lit routers and fake tattoos. He spoke to us about technological transformations and waveshapes.

The Creators Project: How was the performance at CA2M in Spain? What was the Performativity of Things about?

Spiros Hadjidjanos: The performance at CA2M was a double experiment. It was my first performance in an institution and my first collaboration with the artist Rubén Grilo. We tried to subvert things, we built seating rows in a massive freight elevator and the audience was moving from floor to floor seeing the different parts of the performance.

My understanding was that the Performativity of Things was about the power of things to perturb each other, to use Levi Bryant’s words but also about performativity from a realist philosophical perspective. One of the performers was carrying a keyboard encapsulated in blown glass; the object was constantly “moving” throughout the duration of the performance. I saw it as if the object was performing on its own; this is how I understood the entire thing. Objects performing simultaneously with humans and their relationship. I am not a performance artist so I worked with what I am more familiar with: existing architecture and technological transformations. We also explored the relation and how epistemological access and the access to the exhibition spaces of the institution overlap.

Did I see it correctly, or were there not fake tattoos in the performance?

Yes, we used fake tattoos; we wanted to translate elements from data and online sources to the immediate and the performative. I was personally interested in the texture resulting from printing by using the skin as a substrate. I found similarities to the prints that I've done in the past on carbon fibre plates. The tattoos were digitally made so the process felt related to the rest of my work. We printed on the bodies of the performers’ floor plans of CA2M, images of the architectural spaces and other stuff we found online. I saw the skin as permanent of a surface as the carbon fibre plates I use.

In terms of your sculptures, why do you make 3D alumide prints of technology-based objects? Do you hope to immortalize them in a way?

No, I haven’t thought about it that way. I chose alumide because I am interested in its texture as a material. I am printing technology-based objects because in the digital images these objects originate from, virtual and physical qualities co-exist and they become one aluminum body in the final object.

A new piece of yours is the Displaced (Smartphone), how did you decide on this one? Is it your phone?

Yes, it’s my phone. I took a screenshot with the default wallpaper of iOS and then I superimposed the screenshot to an image of a smartphone that I found online. There is this process called displacement mapping; it is for creating rich texture in 3D Software. You pull out the surface of a 2D grayscale image along a vector and the light parts shift up and the darker parts stay down. The algorithm converts the 2D surface into a 3D height map.

I find the transformation of a flat image to an object very fascinating. The “slide-to-unlock” Apple interface patent makes perfect sense on our touch screens but when you transform it to an aluminum object, there is nothing to slide and nothing to move, it becomes absurd. Even the minute the work was created becomes part of the aluminum object, unintentionally immortalized, as you said. The fact that this process includes myself, only as a decision maker but not as a producer of the physical object, makes it more interesting. In the final object, the pulling process of the 2D image and the glitches originating from the low resolution images are visible on the aluminum surface. These imperfections are what make these objects interesting. Another reason I insist on printing these objects is because the content looks framed.

Your Network Sculptures have taken an interesting shape, why this composition?

I like to make things as simple as possible. These look like complicated structures, apparently if you decompose them, they consist of only four pairs of different waveshapes. It is an Ethernet cable split up into its parts and then put back together. They are basically conductors of digital data, time-based works or spatial paths of moving bits. I designed them with parametric software because all eight elements should be insulated from each other; precision is important for these pieces.

Network Sculptures example

That ties into the title of the group show at Future Gallery, Cable Guys. Film reference aside, is the cable the least sexy instrument in internet or digital-based art? Everyone seems to be in love with the screen.

Well, you might be right, everything is becoming “lighter” and more and more transparent, the screens as we know them are about to disappear too but if you look at the entire infrastructure (cloud) it is becoming more and denser with cables plus I think people still like cables.

How do you feel about the direction 3D printing is going today?

I am not very interested in looking at the entire 3D printing industry just because it is taking off. I work primarily with concepts, I use the technology that better serves my idea. For some works, it happened to be 3D printing. For example, the last couple of months I have been working with glass in two completely different directions. On the one hand I encapsulate objects in blown glass, a very traditional technology; on the other hand I am experimenting with transparent screens exploring the integration of digital information with space. With every new work, I try to challenge myself. I am not the first artist thinking this way. Broodthaers used plastic because he believed this would free him from the past. I see 3D printing in a similar fashion.

Can you tell us more about your upcoming book project?

Yes, it is a book about a single work of mine: Network Time, an installation of wireless routers extended with fiber optics. I have been working on it for a while now; it includes two interviews with the philosopher Graham Harman and the media theorist Adrian Mackenzie. The Berlin-based writer, Elvia Wilk has written a beautiful essay about the work, theorizing wireless networks from the perspective of object oriented philosophy.

Spiros Hadjidjanos shows in the ‘Cable Guys’ group show opening May 2 at Future Gallery in Berlin.

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