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Artist Proposes Edible Cell Phones to Feed the World

by Matthew Zuras on October 17, 2009 at 05:01 PM

In our contemporary 'Inconvenient Truth' culture, much of the industrialized world has become nearly obsessed with finding alternative solutions to the massive problems of fuel shortages, waste, and environmental pollution. Newer and wackier varieties of these alternatives spring up daily, like those biofuels made from e. coli bacteria and, gulp, bunnies.

Boo Chapple, an Australian artist concerned with environmentalism, has recently put forward a tongue-in-cheek response to the energy crisis: edible cell phones. Chapple writes in her new pamphlet 'Consumables' that by feeding impoverished nations with "cast-off" phones, we could render starvation an unpleasantness of the past:
In place of e-waste, there would now be e-food. There would be no more photo essay exposés of towns in China piled with PCB's, dusted in plastic and beset with birth defects.
Chapple isn't seriously suggesting that we'll be seeing edible phones in the near future, or even that we should. Instead, her absurdist idea points a mocking finger at frequently ridiculous solutions that cannot possibly take a bite out of the world's current level of consumption and waste. "Instead of upgrading your phone once a year," she writes on her site, "you could buy a new one once a week and know that you were contributing something to the world simply by wasting more." In the style of 'A Modest Proposal,' Chapple satirizes the situation; if consumer society refuses to consume less, then why not gorge ourselves even more? To drive the point home ever further, those phones look more like something out of 'Videodrome' (more dystopian visions of a cyborg future) than they do something you'd actually want to swallow. [From: Boo Chapple, via Fast Company]

Tags: art, cell phone, CellPhone, edible, energy, funny, green, satire, top, weird

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