made for esc medien kunst labor, for the exhibition Out of Control II, 2025 autumn, in Graz, Austria
The solar crawlers are simple, little off-grid robots made of scavenged electronics and wood. They are activated or charged by sunlight and release their energy in the form of mechanical movement. In spite of their crooked looks, they are resilient and slowly keep going. They are an experiment in developing a post-capitalist, solar_punk aesthetic and in fostering a scarcity-oriented working methodology.
The crawlers are inspired by Gijs Gieske’s wandering branches of similar style.1 While Gieske’s creatures are visually unique due to the use of found wood, they all have the same uniform circuit made of new electronic parts that one can assemble at one of Gieske’s workshop sessions to build them. I wanted to take this further out of the maker’s comfort-zone: I restricted myself to using only e-waste found in my surroundings. This way each crawler has a different circuit and so will behave in new ways in reaction to the sun or at the lack of it: one moves when its battery is already charged in the sun and the charging stops in the shade; another one moves only in the sun, etc.
“All working technologies are alike. All broken technologies are broken in their own way.’’2
Our technological environment unsees and disregards the broken, the botched, the imperfect, the asymmetrical, the used, the off-cloud, the non-continous, the disconnected. The crawlers, in contrast, represent the potential of relating to technology in non-mainstream ways, both visually and within their workings: they are not made to be streamlined and symmetrical, perfectly responsive, with their mechanics being invisible. They are not smart and there is no app you can install to operate them. Such rawness and the lack of scalable reproducibility comes from the virtue of not relying on the exploitation of people and natural resources in order to operate.
1 http://gijs.gieskes.nl/documentatie/phasmids/
2 Borrell in Steven J. Jackson: Rethinking Repair, in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Tarleton Gillespie (ed.) et al., The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014
