Gaulon as he repurposes old technology.
Defunct to ReFunct
Paris-Based Artist, “Recyclism,” is Spring 2025 Steiner Artist-in-Residence
Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
written by
Harrison Apple
Ben Gaulon is an artist, researcher, educator and cultural producer based in Paris and working under the name “Recyclism.” His research focuses on both the limits and failures of information-communication technologies. His work investigates society’s entanglement with these outcomes, looking to planned obsolescence, consumerism, disposable societies, ownership and privacy.
Together with Dasha Ilina, he is a founding member of the collective NØ, a non-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote emerging art and design research, and practices that address the social and environmental impact of information and communication technologies in France and beyond, since its creation in 2018. They are both co-directors of NØ SCHOOL NEVERS, since its first edition in 2019.
Gaulon was invited by STUDIO Director Nica Ross as the Spring 2025 Steiner Artist-in-Residence to deliver a lecture on his practice, as well as host a workshop he calls “ReFunct.” Hosted in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, the CMU and Pittsburgh communities were guided through Gaulon’s individual thinking and collective projects to reimagine our discomfort with waste. Gaulon and his collaborators produce software, installations, hardware, net-art, interactive works, street art interventions and open-source tools to reframe the impact of extraction and disposal for electronics.
Drawing on the theme of consumer technology’s cycle of disposability, his work reclaims e-waste through a process of détournement — reassembling, appropriating, hacking and repurposing discarded electronics. Gaulon and the STUDIO team scoured thrift stores, flea markets and e-recycling centers to gather material for a full-day Saturday ReFunct workshop. Following Gaulon’s prompt, participants animated the recently disposed collection of electronic debris into a signal path carrying sound and light through previously unexplored connections.
In disrupting expectations around e-waste, the workshop surfaced the latent potential of discarded materials, recasting technological refuse as points of creative departure.
featuring the following:
photography from Aaron Blum
