{S}crap Sensors

{S}crap Sensors is an ongoing exploration into to the materiality of sensors, responding to the availability of material and resources that feeds into data collection and digital systems.

I’ve been using rubbish or things that we have on hand to make working sensors. A speaker is made by coiling adhesive copper or sewing copper thread into soft materials. You can hear the vibration of materials like plastics when they move from the force between a magnetic field, and an oscillating electromagnetic field made by the coiled copper.

Sensors are entwined with how we see the world. For example, the sensors in our camera phones capture photons of light to release electrons that define how each pixel in an image will look. Much of the data that sensors produce feeds into perceptions of the environment, and it is often not obvious that the machines producing data are material instruments, collecting information in material ways.