Scratching the Surface, 2025
This series of work was made by taking apart a broken 3D printer, called a Big Box, from my workplace. Taking the Big Box apart involved manually unscrewing hundreds of pieces, separating usable parts, and sorting the casing material.
The first circuit board in the stack comes from the printer’s power supply. The second circuit board is 3D Printer’s main logic board. The subsequent photographs so the circuit boards and their components in their original condition. The process of stripping the circuit boards was labor intensive: after unscrewing them from protective layers they were underneath, i de-soldered every component by hand. Removing the solder mask and silkscreen took a lot of experimentation with paint strippers, dremels, pallet scrapers, the back of a spoon, and a lot of sandpaper.
Although i was taking material away from the boards I wouldn’t describe the process of this work as subtractive. Rather, the work positions degradation, decay, and destruction as primary fabrication methods. My longstanding desire to see machine parts exist beyond their capacity to produce capital is held in this fabrication process.
Circuit boards tell a story and I believe they should be treated as cultural texts. The circuit boards featured here come from an e3d Big Box 3d printer. The Big Box was launched on kickstarter in 2015 and became available for purchase around 2017. Based on the trace thickness and soldering methods on the printed circuit boards, it is evident that the power supply circuit board was manufactured decades earlier than the logic circuit board, and they were manufactured on different equipment.
This work, alonside an essay I wrote about it, were featured in the second issue of Sensus. Scratching the Surface was exhibited in the Atlas for Post-Disciplinary Design group exhibition at the Temple Contemporary in Philadelphia in 2025.
