Entangled Systems.

Photo by Ayça Tuğran

DIGITAL MEDIA OBSOLESCENCE // E-WASTE
FORESIGHT RESEARCH // SPECULATIVE DESIGN // GROWING DESIGN // MATERIAL SCIENCES // MEDIA ECOLOGY & MATERIALITY
MATERIAL DRIVEN DESIGN // BIOMATERIALS // SCULPTURES

  • Speculative design research
    (M.A. Thesis Research and project)

  • Berlin, Germany
    University of Europe for Applied Sciences

  • e-waste, IT specific (wires, keyboards, headphone, hard disks, earphones, cables etc), mycelium composite (from grown.bio)

  • Item descriptio

    Berlin New Media Week (Sept 2025) & MaHalla Open for Berlin Art Week (Sept 2025) as a part of the curated exhibition ‘Intelligent Kin’ at MaHalla, Berlin.

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Project Type

Speculative design research
(M.A. Thesis Research and project)

Berlin, Germany
Univerisity of Europe for Applied Sciences

Location

e-waste, IT specific (wires, keyboards, headphone, hard disks, earphones, cables etc),
mycelium composite (from grown.bio)

Materials

Berlin New Media Week (Sept 2025) & MaHalla Open for Berlin Art Week (Sept 2025) as a part of the curated exhibition ‘Intelligent Kin’ at MaHalla, Berlin.

Exhibitions

  • Entangled Systems is a speculative material inquiry beyond the obsolescence of discarded digital media—an experiment in the interplay between digital media waste and fungal networks.

    In this museum of obsolescence, imagined, reside renewed living systems, found growing in electronic waste landfills.

    Set 100 years in the future, it envisions a world where obsolete technologies, buried in the soil, have evolved without human interference and become entangled with non-human ecologies. Living sculptures of mycelium and obsolete media explore how decaying digital forms meet fungi—and the hybrid bio-digital materialities that may emerge. It reframes obsolete digital media as living repositories of memory, both material and digital.

    And finally, prompts us to rethink digital media not as ephemeral things, but as living systems, hopefully encouraging more responsible and conscious design practices in the future.

““When you go to the toilet, shit disappears. You flush it.

Of course, rationally, you know it’s there, in canalization and so on, but at a certain level of your most elementary experience, it disappears from your world.””
— Slavoj Žižek, Examined Life (2008)

How will digital media waste evolve beyond it’s designed obsolescence?

Listen to what could be.

Listen to what might be.

| Photos by Ayça Tuğran |
Entangled systems exhibited as a part of the exhibition ‘Intelligent Kin’ at MaHalla Berlin during Berlin New Media Week & Berlin Art Week
<Sept 2025>

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM

>>>

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM >>>

“A form of logical argument in which ‘a claim is assumed for the sake of argument, and it derives an absurd outcome by taking it to the extreme, concluding the original claim must have been wrong because it led to such an absurd result’.”
— Dunne & Raby, Speculative Everything (2024, p. 80)

THESIS (ASSUMED) CLAIM

All digital media eventually die.
Their death is inevitable.

THE ABSURDITY

The obsolete media continue to live on, take new material forms, and interact with
non-human entities - fungi.

MUSEUM OF OBSOLESCENCE

>>>

MUSEUM OF OBSOLESCENCE >>>

Uncovering Archived Digital Media Fossils,
100 years later.

WHAT IS FOUND?

The obsolete media continue to live on,
take new material forms, and interact
with non-human entities - fungi.

GROWING PROTOTYPES

>>>

GROWING PROTOTYPES >>>