In 2013, Darsha Hewitt invited me to write the catalogue essay for her installation, Electrostatic Bell Choir at Montreal’s Centre des arts actuels Skol. In that delicate and thoughtful work, she repurposed obsolete CRT televisions to generate static electricity, which activated salvaged electrostatic bells. I described that mass of stacked TVs (broadcasting endless snow), their accompanying bells and the resulting tingly ambient soundtrack as an “aperiodic electromechanical orchestra.”
That’s basically Darsha’s modus operandi. She rescues technologies from the trash heap of ‘technological progress’ and transforms them into sensory environments where we can re-encounter them anew. I was excited at the prospect of talking about domesticity with Darsha. Not because her projects are some second coming of Semiotics of the Kitchen, but because her engagement with the materiality of consumer electronics offers new ways to think about everyday life.
When we think of home, we envision a sanctified bubble, sheltered from the pressures of capitalism and society. Beyond family dynamics and our daily rhythms, our homes are filled with technological objects, each carrying its own history, politics, and material consequences. The baby monitor surveilling the nursery, the discarded TV on the curb, the stereo system marketed as an escape—these aren’t neutral tools but active agents that subtly shape how we live.
Darsha’s practice renders those invisible systems visible, revealing the stories embedded in our most familiar objects. Her path from childhood surrounded by antiques to media archaeological investigations of technological waste reveals how the domestic sphere has always been influenced by the discarded remnants of previous eras.
Greg J. Smith (GJS): If this were therapy, I’d ask you to talk about your relationship with your parents. But since we’re here to talk about your work with found objects and electronics, could you tell me about your earliest encounters with material culture? What surrounded you at home as a child?
Darsha Hewitt (DH): My mom is an artist, and my father was an antique dealer in the greater Ottawa region. We’d always be on the lookout for stuff at estate sales, auctions, and antique shows. My dad would keep me busy saying things like, “This is how you identify Bakelite by smelling and rubbing it,” or “Look under that table. What do the nails look like?” I learned that by inspecting objects, you could learn about their conditions and origins. Things have stories to tell, and what others consider garbage often has value.
Later, I studied interior design at Algonquin College in Ottawa. The first year was spent drafting, during which I learned that different line widths represented different materials, essentially serving as a visual code. I felt like a machine doing this precise technical drawing, but I loved it.
After leaving that program to study fine arts at the University of Ottawa, I became an AV technician despite having no idea what ‘AV’ stood for. I worked in a basement cage, renting out equipment and figuring out what was broken. This was when people were using S-Video cables and MiniDV tapes, right when Arduino was emerging. Part of my job was determining which old equipment to keep and which to discard. My antique background kicked in—I saw beauty in these broken objects. I’d think, “Maybe it’s broken, but it sounds really cool when it does this,” or “I can turn it into something else.”
This sparked the realization that discarded household objects could be legitimate starting points for artistic practice. You don’t need to dumpster dive to find interesting electronics; they’re being thrown away all around us.
GJS: When did you first open a piece of consumer electronics with artistic ambitions?
DH: While living in Montreal around 2011, during the analogue television phase-out, I discovered discarded TVs everywhere during morning jogs. These weren’t just electronic waste; many had beautiful wooden cabinets with distinct character. I began collecting them, particularly fascinated by their metal knobs and unique designs.
Initially I was cautious about opening them (the electrocution risk is real). I remembered how CRT televisions created static electricity strong enough to make your hair stand on end when you were close to the screen. I realized these obsolete objects were essentially particle accelerators that could function as mechanical generators.
What felt empowering was the freedom to experiment without consequences. These discarded televisions clearly had histories—you could see traces of their previous lives in worn buttons and old stickers—but now they were worthless. I could disassemble, modify, or break them without concern. They became my ideal artistic material: abundant, free, and carrying no risk if my experiments failed.
GJS: Looking at your work, there’s a clear aesthetic pattern: the Fisher-Price baby monitors in Feedback Babies (2017), vintage wood-panelled CRT televisions in Electrostatic Bell Choir (2012), the East German Trolli lawnmower in Soziale Sollbruchstelle (2018). These objects all have this distinct, retro, clunky aesthetic far-removed from today’s sleek consumer tech. What draws you to work with these particular types of objects?
DH: Sure! In Feedback Babies, the monitors had a nostalgic quality. Fisher-Price used to make them so durable that you could throw them off the CN Tower and they’d be fine. I kept seeing them pop up in secondhand stores; there were just so many of them, like a little army.
From my time as an AV technician, I was familiar with feedback effects and radio interference. Rather than using baby monitors as a performance, I wanted to create a space where they could interact on their own. I was drawn to them because of their abundance and durability. When I first assembled the installation, it freaked people out—“Oh my God, it’s like little babies worshiping their moms and crying”—and that scale was important.
While feedback is often bold and chaotic, I was interested in something more minimal but equally effective. These baby-sized objects make sounds resembling crying or whimpering. I wanted to work with feedback in a way that juxtaposed the excessive volume often found in noise music, which I find to be sometimes excessive and aggressive.
At quieter volumes, people are forced to really listen. With those baby monitors, you become aware of your body as they amplify the immediate environment and pick up on small sounds such as your own movements, creating this strange human-machine connection.
GJS: Hah! I remember that moment in the mid-2010s when there was panic about baby monitor security. People were picking up their neighbours’ transmissions from down the street. Have viewers of the work commented on their relationships with the devices they use to monitor their children?
DH: The best part of making artwork is when people share how it makes them feel. This installation doesn’t tell you anything directly but creates an uneasy feeling. People have mentioned hearing interference from other rooms, which makes them think about the invisible aspects of technology we can’t see or control. Some parents tell me they’ve ditched their baby monitors completely—the thought of strangers eavesdropping on their children’s sleep is too unsettling. These conversations reveal how the work connects to anxieties about technology in our intimate spaces.
GJS: A synth repair technician once told me he can only fix pre-1988 devices because electronics shifted to surface-mount components (tiny parts that are densely packed and nearly impossible to repair by hand). Is your focus on this vintage era of consumer electronics due to technical limitations, or is it a deliberate aesthetic choice?
DH: I’ve never been interested in using electronics to just build ‘anything I could imagine’ from scratch. Programming things with an Arduino feels overwhelming—there are too many options, and it’s almost too easy. I’m drawn to older electronics because I can physically engage with them. I can open them up, look inside, and feel a mechanical connection to how they work.
With older materials, I can see how things are connected, and they were typically built to be repaired. I can find service manuals or connect with technicians who understand them and are willing to share their knowledge. As an artist, my language is material aesthetics. I find it interesting to tweak familiar household objects just enough to make people see them differently, to question what these weird boxes, like radios or loudspeakers, actually are.
GJS: Increasingly, the objects around us aren’t meant to be opened; they’re designed as black boxes that you replace rather than repair. Even with the “right to repair” movements gaining ground in Europe, most consumer technology remains deliberately inaccessible. How do you think our relationship with domestic objects has changed over the last several decades?
Recently, I performed in a small German village through an urban art program that connects artists with local communities. They paired me with a repair café started by retired men, formerly a social club that met weekly for beers, who decided to do something more community-oriented in their town’s church.
When I visited this old church, I found a thriving space where older people gathered with community members who brought in their broken belongings to be repaired. There’s a real connection happening—these old objects become interfaces between people. When there are older things that you can actually get to know and understand, it keeps you in touch with each other. The act of repairing creates genuine human contact.
Modern technology does the opposite. It prevents you from interacting and connecting with others. Instead, it provides everyone with separate tools and subscriptions that tie them to companies rather than communities. We’ve gained the democratization of technology, but at a cost. At least in the West, we’ve lost this connection.
GJS: …because capitalism. The 1970s and 1980s were the golden era for electronics durability. Hi-fi equipment and home appliances from that era are known to last 50 years. Between 1985 and 1990, companies began to deliberately shift to planned obsolescence, designing products to fail shortly after their warranties expired. The CD player I replaced my cassette deck with at age 12 was technically inferior, despite feeling like an upgrade to newer technology.
DH: Exactly, planned obsolescence combined with aggressive marketing. When you open up these machines and understand how they work, you can quickly detect the industry’s deceptions. The early hi-fi era was particularly problematic with its gendered marketing, explicitly targeted at men: “Your wife is stupid. Escape to your man cave with expensive gear that gives you sex appeal and autonomy in your home.” Although women are arguably less stereotyped in music and tech ads today, claims persist about fancy innovation supposedly creating “richer listening experiences” when they are really just marketing ploys to extract money from a predominantly male audience.
GJS: That reminds me. On your recommendation, I read Kyle Devine’s article “A Mysterious Music in the Air: Cultural Origins of the Loudspeaker.”1 It was great, and it talks about how the loudspeaker was overlooked entirely until Bob Dylan adopted the electric guitar. Aside from some anxious musicians who worried that PA systems would replace their jobs in the 1920s and 1930s, the loudspeaker remained largely invisible in the discourse surrounding sound technology until the advent of rock music.
DH: Jonathan Sterne once pointed out to me that loudspeakers are the most abundant media technology; you find them everywhere, even in those disposable singing birthday cards. What fascinates me is how speakers mimic the human voice in their construction. Sterne’s work also reveals the troubling history behind their invention—Alexander Graham Bell’s eugenic interests aimed at eliminating deafness by forcing oral communication over sign language. This shows how even seemingly neutral technologies can have deeply problematic origins.
My High Fidelity Wasteland project addresses this cycle of decay. There’s always music in the garbage, an obsolete format, and the music industry has consistently been at the forefront of waste culture. Here, I draw inspiration from theorist Elodie A. Roy’s research into the pervasive “throwaway culture” of overproduction of recorded music.2 As an artist, I approached sound not as a composer but by questioning its infrastructure—the machines and gear that create it.
I’ve grown bored of how experimental music is often framed: a lone (typically male) performer who creates a “powerful experience” using high-powered technical infrastructure that’s designed to remain unnoticed. The performance stirs emotion, yet the systems enabling it are rarely acknowledged. Musical love letters to nature get composed to express the pain of environmental loss, but we seldom question the tools that make it possible. It’s difficult to achieve emotional authority through sound without recognizing one’s role within the broader infrastructure that may be complicit in the very issues being mourned.
GJS: Could you discuss the concept behind High Fidelity Wasteland a little more, why you structured that project as a trilogy, and what its three obsolete sound and recording technologies represent to you?
DH: The work examines the accumulation of waste produced by the music industry, and how this technology continues to seep into the earth. I structured it as a trilogy to give it an epic narrative, with different installations exploring distinct aspects of audio technology.
The first part, 100 Year Old Quicksilver Cloud (2020), reanimates and sonifies a hundred-year-old vacuum tube that produces electrons by vaporizing mercury. The second, The Protoplastic Groove (2021), explores shellac records in the Black Forest, a historic region associated with the record player industry. Shellac itself is fascinating—it’s actually a resin produced by insects. The third, Broken Loudspeaker Pop (2023), focuses on loudspeakers and their accumulation. I collected many discarded and dying loudspeakers and fed them signals to capture each one’s distinct acoustic voice in its state of decay.
GJS: You mentioned enjoying how people respond to your work. What were your sonic goals with these installations?
DH: I wanted to have a hands-on dialogue with these decomposing objects and uncover their noisy underbelly. With Quicksilver Cloud, I mic’ed the vacuum tube’s inner universe, so to speak, to listen for what we aren’t supposed to hear. It doesn’t sound pretty—its oscillations are piercing, but the ancient chemical light it emits is quite vivid and beautiful. For the second work, I learned to repair and modify the PE REX, a 1950s-era record player, from a senior technician at the German Phono Museum. These machines could play transcription records at 16 RPM, but I use them to play shellac records designed for 78 RPM. Slowing them down creates a cinematic, sombre quality, allowing the listener to inhabit the sound of each scratch and imperfection.
The installation meditates on shellac as a material that predates vinyl, a substance created by mother bugs to protect their young that became central to the early recording industry. The worn-down platters I collected from the community emphasize this sense of decomposition.
GJS: Soziale Sollbruchstelle explores German Democratic Republic (GDR) technology through the Trolli ESM 2 lawnmower. Can you talk about what drew you to this idiosyncratic object and how your research into East German consumer technology evolved into this multi-faceted work?
DH: When I first moved to Germany to teach at the Bauhaus, I met Wolfgang, a retired television technician from the GDR who collected discarded items. His home was extraordinary—filled with working refrigerators, orderly arrangements of car batteries, and Eastern Bloc television and radio equipment. He worked in an era of material scarcity where finding workarounds was essential, quite different from my artistic choice to use discarded objects.
In his yard, I discovered this unusual lawnmower that looked like it was going to do war on the lawn, with a motor hood resembling a helmet. I became fascinated with these Trollis and sought more for my artwork. I found a German version of Craigslist where people sold GDR tech and tried to purchase several motor hoods. Each had different colours and character, showing years of wear.
The user manuals particularly interested me. In keeping with communist ideology, they depicted women as capable of using and fixing technology, showing women’s hands in the diagrams. This became the foundation of my project, which was funded by the Art University of Berlin.
When this work is exhibited in museums in former East Germany, it often resonates most strongly with building superintendents or maintenance workers who recognize these objects from their childhood.
GJS: To wrap up, I’d like to return to the issue’s theme of domesticity. I’m curious about the relationship between your workspace and home life. Is your studio in your house, and how does your art-making bleed into your family life?
DH: I am fortunate to work here in Berlin in a shared atelier in a formerly squatted streetcar factory. The building and rent are protected since the façade was part of the Berlin Wall. That said, many spontaneous studio activities carry on after work in my smaller workshop at home.
Before moving to Germany, I couldn’t picture an artistic career that would allow me to have a family with a child. Culturally, things are quite different here. Things such as free daycare, affordable groceries, and a societal assumption that kids and families are just part of the arts and culture landscape make it doable. This echoes in my domestic life too. My family shares my passion and curiosity for exploring sound and building electronics. My practice, in a way, has evolved into a sort of family business, and the work that I publicly present grows from the fun experiments we do at home.
Darsha Hewitt (CA/DE) is an interdisciplinary artist investigating the material politics of Music and Sound. She makes electromechanical sound installations, drawings, audio-visual works, how-to videos, sculptural installations and performative workshops that explore technological entanglements and their implications on humans and ecology. Her signature DIY electronics and experimental approach to sound pedagogy have been profiled in forums such as Chaos Computer Congress, Make: Magazine and recently in Garnet Hertz’s book ‘Art + DIY Electronics’ (MIT Press, 2023). https://darsha.org
Greg J. Smith is an editor and cultural worker based in Hamilton, Ontario. He is an editor for HOLO, a hybrid print-digital publication focused on ‘emerging trajectories in art, science, and technology,’ and he has written widely on media art. In 2024, Greg completed his PhD at McMaster University on the emergence of the programmable drum machine in the 1980s, and he continues to research music technology histories. He currently teaches at the University of Waterloo. https://gr3gjsmith.net
- Kyle Devine, “A Mysterious Music in the Air: Cultural Origins of the Loudspeaker,” Popular Music History 8, no. 1 (2014): 5–28.
- Elodie A. Roy, “Total Trash: Recorded Music and the Logic of Waste,” Popular Music 39, no. 1 (2020): 88–107.
This article is published in issue 42.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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