Dr Dani Ploeger

BMus, PhD, AFHEA
Job title
Research Fellow
Dani Ploeger
Orcid ID
0000-0002-8920-0521
Institutional Repository

Profile

I am an artist working with computer programming, electronics hacking, cultural theory and performance. My work investigates and subverts the spectacles of sex, violence and waste in techno-consumer culture. I have made a VR installation while accompanying frontline troops in the Russo-Ukrainian War, travelled to dump sites in Nigeria to collect electronic waste originating from Europe, stolen razor wire from the so-called ‘high-tech fence’ on the EU outer border in Hungary and interviewed witnesses of US drone attacks in Pakistan about sound and technologies of violence.

My artwork is exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals around the world. I have received commissions from ZKM Karlsruhe, Venice Architecture Biennale and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, among others. My VR installation The Grass Smells So Sweet was awarded the jury prize of the VRHAM Festival for art and virtual reality and my work has been acquired by public and private collections across Europe, including the WRO Media Art Center in Poland and In4Art in the Netherlands.

I grew up on the seaside in the Dutch Bible Belt and subsequently studied music at various conservatoires in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Germany, eventually graduating from the Orchestra Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic as a trombonist. From 2005-7, I lived in Ramallah, Palestine, where I was a music and performance teacher. My experience of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during this time was key to my decision to retire as a musician and focus on my work in cultural materialism and performance with everyday technologies.

I completed a PhD on sound, performance and media theory at the University of Sussex in 2012. From 2013-2015 I was Senior Lecturer and Course Leader Performance Arts at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. I am currently a Research Fellow at Central and a Fellow at V2_Lab for the unstable media in Rotterdam. At Central, I lead the practice-based research project Disobedient Devices, which explores the afterlives of consumer technologies in Europe, Asia and Africa to envisage new ways to shape and experience digital culture. The project, which was initiated in 2013, has been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the Mondriaan Fund (NL), among others.

Areas of Expertise

Cultural studies of technology: waste and media archaeology, sexuality in digital culture, representations of violence

PhD Supervision

I am interested in supervising doctoral projects in the areas of performance and technology, digital art and materiality.

Key Publications

Journal articles

2019. ‘Between Smart Technologies and Soviet Guns: Imaging the New Heroic Figure in Postdigital Warfare’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 15.2, 215-226. 

2017. ‘Abject Digital Performance: Engaging the Politics of Electronic Waste’, Leonardo, 50.2, 138-142. 

Book chapters

2019. ‘Imagining the Seamless Cyborg: Computer System Sounds as Embodying Technologies’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 

2017. Making and Breaking: Electronic Waste Recycling as Methodology’, in Digital Bodies: Creativity and Technology in the Arts and Humanities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 49-64. 

Doctoral thesis

2012. Sonified Freaks and Sounding Prostheses: Sonic representation of bodies in performance art. PhD thesis, University of Sussex. 

External Practice

Installations and performances

A Space War Monument (2020-21). Land art performance with GPS-controlled bulldozer in the Arabian Desert to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Gulf War. Commissioned by The Kuwait Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

OUR VALUES (2019). Installation with razor wire and horn loudspeaker, documentation of performance at EU border fence in Hungary. Commissioned by the New Society for Fine Art Berlin (nGbK).

Laboratory of Electronic Ageing (2019). Installation with industrial drop testing machine, electronic shaver and performance video. Commissioned by The New Institute Museum for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture, Rotterdam. Supported by Leiden University and the Dutch Research Council as part of the research consortium ‘Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical Making’

The Grass Smells So Sweet (2018). Installation with VR headset, living grass, synthetic grass smell, found texts from online discussion forums. Awarded jury prize at the 2018 VRHAM Festival for Art and Virtual Reality in Hamburg.

ASSAULT (2016). iPad with bullet hole, 7.62x39mm round, video animation. Jury Selection of the Japan Media Art Festival, shortlisted for the Celeste Art Prize.