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Blog / Novel / Artifacts
Singers, statesmen, and saints, among others, have left their mark on the Brooklyn landscape in the form of parks and playgrounds bearing their names. It’s a great tribute to a person to give his name to a public space. What better way is there to keep the name if not the sprit of a person alive than by turning it into something concrete and functional?
Whenever I pass by Harry Chapin Playground in Brooklyn Heights, nestled between the BQE and some charming houses with lush, sun-dappled yards, I can’t get his signature tunes, “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Taxi,” out of my head.
Brooklyn’s techno-waste is disgorged continually through flea markets, stoop sales, and junk shops, producing a veritable time line of “consumer electronics.”
Alongside the other trinkets and cultural detritus, dead tech seems more stolid—simply a byproduct of our relentless compulsion to upgrade, the personification of our “disposable society.”
In dead tech we see the fate of all innovation. And whether piled in a heap on the sidewalk or carefully arranged on a tarp, it’s not simply our old tools being displayed but the fallacy of progress.
The images and text on this site are Copyright 2007 by Adam Eisenstat. All rights reserved.