"life and death of a smartphone" (Dramatized reenactment) is an installation that plays with the concept of technology anthropomorphization to investigate the new emotional relationship we have created with our communication devices. 

 

The artist applies the format and codes used by news TV reports to relate scenes of extreme violence and tragic human death in the analogue world to recreate the last 20% of battery-life of her old iPhone. Displayed in loop on the phone itself, the piece turns viewers into physical witnesses of the slow one-hour-long virtual agony of the phone leading to its death. The “death scene” repeats over and over every hour as a new video loop starts.

 

The inclination to ascribe human qualities to disposable unanimated objects can be traced back to Antiquity but the modern anthropomorphization of technology has taken an all-new meaning, as communication devices are playing greater roles in our day-to-day lives, progressively becoming an extension of our own identity. Phones die over and over thru the course of their overall lifespan. While the linguistic twist helps us make more sense of technological evolution, "life and death of a smartphone" (Dramatized reenactment) questions their further implications in the way we think about technology and about death itself.