Recycled cell phones as art.
Boston, Mass.—In yesterday’s Boston Globe, I came across an article in the Lifestyle/Green Living section that really caught my eye…and my ear. An art student from Allston, Mass. has an installation in Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) that consists entirely of discarded cellular phones.
Rob Pettit, 26, has been spending months collecting, sorting and arranging old cell phones, even using their ring tones and camera shots in some of his pieces.
“It’s just interesting to see what an explosion of products [this is], and realizing that every time you get one, it’s on the verge of being replaced by another,” Pettit told the Boston Globe. “There’s an estimated half a billion cellphones just sitting in people’s desk drawers.”
Pettit wanted to kick-start his career after college by doing an immersive work. Already interested in cell phones, he started collecting old ones from his friends and family. He eventually began ordering them by the pallet-load from cellphone recycling companies. He has amassed more than 5,500 discarded phones, most of which are on display in the form of large sculptures at the SMFA.
“Whenever a student takes something slated for a landfill and turns it into art they get an A-plus as far as I’m concerned,” said SFMA visiting artist Jason Middlebrook. Pettit is a former student of Middlebrook, and now works with him as a teaching assistant. “All my students are making this kind of recycled art,” Middlebrook told the Boston Globe, “but now it’s an environmental statement, whereas before it was more out of necessity.”
Mike Newman, vice president of ReCelluar Inc., a Michigan-based cell phone recycling company that sent Pettit pallets of phones, explains that only about 30 percent of phones are now recycled or donated to charity, either for reuse or to be mined for metals.
I’ll be going to the SMFA later this week to check out the installment.
Image source: The Boston Globe
