The Reality Recycling Center examines our evolving relationship with images through interactive media, installations, and performances.
This project is centrally concerned with what it means to live in the Internet’s growing datascape. Through this virtual reflection of not only our own lives, but all those around us and before us, today’s media environment has become a temporal mash-up of ideas and aesthetics spanning decades. As we find our place in this incomprehensible mass of digital images, the world is remapped; remade; recycled for the Cloud.
The Reality Recycling Center was started by Scott Diekema, Nicholas Byrne, and Sam Lowe. Guided by the history and philosophy of media, our research-driven practice uses tools from the past to contextualize this digital moment. Experimentation with legacy media equipment and techniques such as stereoscopy, circuit bending, and CRT televisions has helped us to better understand how shifts in technology influence our personal consumption and production of images.
We care deeply about the ways that images shape how we relate to ourselves and each other. We hope that these works will encourage others to interrogate this world of images, too, revealing more critical and engaged media practices in the process.