Bronze, leather, and alabaster base.
Bronze: 13 x 5 1/2 x 9 in
Stone: approx. 5 x 6 x 7 in
Edition of 6
Published by Carolina Nitsch

Digital Bondage

Digital Bondage was sparked by queasy feelings about technologies ruthlessly taking over our analog lives. The evolution of technology is natural, inevitable, but we become captives of the daily struggle to learn and obey its ever-morphing language of “upgrades” and the latest quirks and moves that govern our navigation of laptops and smartphones. We’re hostages of the programmers, in bondage (and maybe so erotically so) to a robotic future. Films like Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), and especially Blade Runner 2049 laid out a clear narrative of our future, growing more mechanized day by day. These ideas are hardly new, but it’s natural to resist the inevitable—in action and expression—lest we be swallowed up whole. I loved science fiction when it was just fiction. Now that we’re living it, I’m more ambivalent. 

This bronze mechanical hand is cast at twice the size of my own to feel like a tool. Its hardware details are burnished where the leather laces through and tied off. The extra-long fingernail I considered another piece of hardware.

This scultpure has an alternate, second title, Dirty Robot Finger, which refers to a botched robotic surgery that left me with a nearly untreatable bacterial infection and scars from several abdominal puncture wounds. The electronic robot that operated on me, aptly named “The da Vinci Surgical System,” promised a safer, less invasive operation than the hand-work of a human surgeon.