Entangled Systems.

Photo by Ayça Tuğran

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

  • Berlin, Germany
    University of Europe for Applied Sciences

  • Prof. Emily Smith
    Riccardo Torresi

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

  • 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.

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

Landfill 0800, 2125

  • 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)

The discarding of waste in our world, and its disappearance, exists merely in our minds and not as a physical reality. It is nothing more than an illusion that colours our daily perception. Yet it serves as a reminder of the larger impacts of the daily subconscious habits of the human mind. This waste, out of sight and out of mind, disappears only to reappear again in our landfills.

Within existing ecologies of waste, Entangled Systems speculates about the materiality, obsolescence, and future of electronic waste.

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

What is found 100 years later?

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM

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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)

(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.

WONDERING

?

WONDERING ?

Without human intervention, how will obsolete data on devices be encrypted, reinterpreted or consumed by fungal intelligence?

What does the future material aesthetic of digital media look like?

In a world without binary code, what languages might emerge from the entanglement of fungi and obsolete media?

If not humans, then who will these
living, growing bio-digital hybrids
serve?

Who will be their new user?

Maybe this new world defined by perpetual re-creation, rather than perpetual innovation.

Is this the new post-industrial digital avant-garde, where waste becomes a resource?

MUSEUM OF OBSOLESCENCE

Uncovering archived digital media fossils,
living, breathing in their new forms.

1.

The year is 2125. As far as the eye can see, exhausted soil lies beneath, while above ground are the remnants of the digital age.

Endless terrains of a
post-industrial world.

2.

The plastics have survived, choking the soil as it forms layers of synthetic rubbish—sites of digital waste become living museums of obsolescence.

The familiar is extinct, but the unwanted is abundant.

3.

Navigating the labyrinths of waste, the foraging mycelial threads emerged as agents of renewal.

Our waste, their feast.

A collaboration between fungi and obsolete technologies, landfills transform into experimental labs overflowing with potential

4.

It is now the world of mycelium networks repurposing digital fossils. Designers of this new world, they create and
co-exist with the natural and synthetic, birthing new, unfamiliar forms, redefining everyday devices — glitching, growing, sensing.

HUMANS AT THE MUSEUM
OF OBSOLESCENCE

| 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>

reimagining a past that once witnessed the waste thumping, falling, vibrating, breaking, and glitching through ambient sound textures.

This soundscape is framed as a recovered recording, found years later from a device once thought obsolete.

Sounds of
soil memory

'GROWING' PROTOTYPES

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'GROWING' PROTOTYPES >>>