Niio Editorial
Dev Harlan is a New York-based artist whose work in sculpture, installation, and digital media explores the interplay between technology, nature, and the impact of human activity on our planet. His practice delves into themes such as landscape, anthropogenic change, and technological consumption, prompting viewers to question the often-assumed separation between human societies and the natural world. Harlan’s work invites audiences to see technology as embedded within, and inseparable from, the environment rather than as an external force.
Harlan’s work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, with solo exhibitions in New York at the Christopher Henry Gallery and Gallery Madison Park. He has been included in international group shows such as “Noor” at the Sharjah Art Museum, the New Museum’s “Ideas City” in New York, and the Singapore Light Art Festival. Recognized for his contributions to digital media arts, Harlan was a 2020 NYFA Fellowship Finalist and won a 2022 Mozaik Artist Grant. His work is included in the permanent collections of corporate and private collectors, underscoring his impact and appeal.
Dev Harlan has launched on Niio his most recent series of artworks, Speculative Cores, which offer a compelling visual metaphor of the effects of our consumerist society on the environment. In this interview, he elaborates on the concepts and the processes behind his work.
Dev Harlan. Speculative Cores (Internet of Bubble Mailers), 2024
This new series explores the impact of our consumerist society on our planet, made evident in the growing amounts of waste that we are producing. It is obviously connected to your previous work exploring geology and terraformation. Can you elaborate on the connections between your previous work and this series?
Much of my work has a geological theme motivated by travels and residencies in the desert, and more recently my continuing education in Earth Science. When studying the landscape it is difficult to ignore the effects of anthropogenic change. The most obvious in the desert being strip mines, of which I have visited many. These are inextricably linked to technology –every single electronic device, battery or screen contains elements that must be extracted from the Earth.
In my previous moving image artworks I have worked with this theme of global resource extraction and the myth of limitless consumption through the juxtaposition of landscape elements and technological debris. This new work “Speculative Cores” is just one step adjacent where I am expressing this theme through the language of geoscience, specifically the well known form of the geological core sample. Technology is seen buried in stratigraphic layers with the rocks and minerals of which it is made.
“Every single electronic device, battery or screen contains elements that must be extracted from the Earth.”
The artworks present a series of 3D-scanned elements including sand and stone, as well as plastics and e-waste. Can you describe the process of creation?
In some ways this begins from a habit of collecting things. I have boxes of jars and bottles containing sand samples I have collected from all over the world, wherever I travel. Rocks also. I also have accumulations of electronic junk in the studio, and sometimes collect more from recycling centers and the vast amounts of waste left on sidewalks and loading docks throughout NYC.
In my process of 3D scanning artworks in the studio I began mixing materials–studies or works in progress with sand and rocks and broken electronics. For the core samples series I layer all these diverse materials in a large acrylic cylinder and create a scan of the cylinder. The scans are then further combined and composed with each other using digital tools.
“Our landfills will one day be parts of mountains, with cell phones, cars, bricks and diapers. We may ask with seriousness, is that the record we wish to leave behind?”
Composing these 3D scans as cylinders that evoke geological core samples gives a powerful message, suggesting that all this trash and debris will remain on our planet long after our present time. Do you think that viewers will grasp the meaning of the core sample as a testimony of a process of centuries, or millenia?
Certainly that is the intention, and indeed many of the proposed definitions of the Anthropocene epoch attempt to define a specific place in the geological record where humans have already left indelible traces, such as increased CO2 concentrations in stone, or radioactive particles from nuclear weapons testing.
I see many artists examining this form of the core cylinder, in what has been termed the ‘geological turn’, as it is a widely recognized shorthand for our ability to understand Earth history through the geosciences. In a real sense a core can be considered a dataset that records hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. But so also is the side of a mountain. Our landfills will one day be parts of mountains, with cell phones, cars, bricks and diapers. We may ask with seriousness, is that the record we wish to leave behind?
Dev Harlan. Speculative Cores (Alabaster Quickcam), 2024
Besides the conceptual aspect of putting these elements together, there is a clear attention to aesthetics, as is also evidenced in your previous series Hegemony of Screensavers. Which aesthetic decisions influenced the making of these compositions?
The photogrammetry scanning process comes with a lot of artifacts and unpredictability and there is a tension between wanting to embellish or “improve” the scan versus letting the model be what it is. I think I take a cue here from Hito Steryerl’s “poor image” theory in that leaving the artifacts and distortions in the scanning process helps tell the story of what the artwork is and how it came to be. The model simply rotates through the frame against a solid field to achieve a sort of literalness in presenting a 3D scan as precisely what it is.
At the other end of this tension I do want to add some uncanniness or departure from reality, as the artwork is still only a facsimile of the real. The trailing after image I use a lot also has a sort of literalness to it – the incremental temporality of time base art. It also provides emergent aesthetic properties and a sort of elegance in pattern and form that I find satisfying. Part of the strategy is to draw in a viewer’s attention with an aesthetic appeal which, on closer inspection, may communicate a more difficult story about the entanglement of nature and technological civilizations.
“I aim to achieve a sort of literalness in presenting a 3D scan as precisely what it is, but I also do want to add some uncanniness or departure from reality, as the artwork is still only a facsimile of the real.”