Gallery
foto: Przemysław Walczak
Video Gallery
warning! please note that those videos are quite heavy comparing with other visual content available here in this Digital Sanctuary, please stream responsibly!
Directing: Paulina Zommer
Camera and editing: Przemysław Walczak
Experiment overview
A collaborative project developed with the National Ethnographic Museum in Poland and House of European History, expanding the exhibition Throwaway with a new chapter dedicated to digital waste.
The project reframed discarded technologies as cultural artefacts silent witnesses of Europe’s technological acceleration, shifting values, and patterns of consumption. Through audiovisual storytelling, obsolete devices became historical evidence of how progress is produced, consumed, and abandoned.
Strategic focus
The project explored digital waste as a cultural and historical narrative through:
Narrative direction and scriptwriting: developing the conceptual storyline that framed digital waste as an archive of societal choices, technological optimism, and systemic obsolescence.
Audiovisual documentation: creating video materials that transformed forgotten computers, outdated smartphones, and discarded storage systems into carriers of collective memory and cultural meaning.
Curatorial collaboration & location research: working closely with the National Ethnographic Museum to identify authentic spaces and objects that truthfully reflected Europe’s evolving relationship with technology and waste.
Outcomes
The project resulted in a two-part video installation presented at the House of European History in Brussels, seamlessly integrated into the wider exhibition on waste and material culture.
By placing digital remnants within a museum context, the work offered visitors an alternative perspective on technological progress, one seen not through innovation, but through what society leaves behind.
Main reflection
This project revealed digital waste as a contemporary archaeological layer, a record of speed, disposability, and systemic acceleration.
By shifting focus from what we preserve to what we discard, the narrative exposed the cultural mechanisms behind planned obsolescence, hyper-consumption, and the environmental cost of technological desire. Digital waste emerged not as a technical problem alone, but as a mirror of our collective imagination of progress.