Clay PCB

De-grow, feminist hardware, urban-mining, open-source, interactive art, ceramics, fair-trade, speculative design

It is an open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains not only plastics but also conflict minerals such as tungsten, tin, tantalum, silver and gold. The Clay PCB Investigates alternative hardware from locally sourced materials, so-called ethical hardware, to develop and speculate upon renewable practices for the benefit of both nature and humans. We explored different materials, sentient, low-impact, non-toxic, fair traded, recycled and urban mined means of production. The Clay PCB challenges the common PCB (printed circuit board) economies in an artistic, creative, positive and responsible way applying feminist hacking as an artistic methodology and critical framework. The Clay PCB is a PCB board made of natural clay, collected in Burgenland (At) and fired according to ancient craft techniques in a open wood fire. The conductive tracks of the circuit use recycled silver and all the components are recycled from old electronics. The PCB works as a pre-programmed microcontroller (such as the Arduino) prepared to connect several input sensors (analog and digital) and outputs such as leds, piezo and DC motors (up to 12Volt).

The board was created to empower artists and creatives to make their own artworks following our feminist hardware minimum standards: Without mining in harmful ways; Environmentally friendly; Under fair working conditions; Manufactured from ubiquitously available materials; Without generating e-wast; Empowering care and repair for all; Our project is totally open sourced and further instructions for Programming and soldering the components, 3D printing files, code can be found in our GitHub

Ph: Violetta Wakolbinger