Maya Buffett-Davis at Soldes

Maya Buffett-Davis, Computer Lab Loveseat (detail) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Soldes.

One of the earliest writing systems, cuneiform, was derived as a simple and economic means of consolidating information that the mind could not hold. Clay, abundantly available, could be easily marked with a reed stylus, worked into the shape of a tablet, and left to dry in the Mesopotamian sun.¹ Thousands of years later, it’s evident how this early impulse to preserve and share data has brought us to the information age, in which binary code, a language made of zeros and ones, provides instruction for an infinite computational network. Computer Lab Loveseat, Maya Buffett-Davis’ debut at Soldes, used ceramic, one of the oldest artistic media,² to construct patchwork sculptures of laptops and cellphones that greet the digital age with analog materiality. By representing these electronic devices, which increasingly dissociate us from material reality, as static objects in wood and clay, she invites viewers to reimagine transient digital ephemera as enduring artifacts of human life. Buffett-Davis makes a case for artmaking as its own kind of technology—a tool for communication, sharing, knowledge, and information that exists in the same lineage as both the computer and cuneiform.

Computer Lab Loveseat transformed the gallery’s ground-floor, eight-by-three-foot vitrine into a speculative computer lab reminiscent of a classroom or library. 52 Two early-model ceramic iPhones sat on a white enamel, plywood, and maple classroom table (designed by Nico B. Young) between reproductions of three Apple laptops ordered from smallest to largest. Each laptop was meticulously assembled using layers of found wooden scraps, including antique yardsticks, while the display screens, keyboards, and trackpads were ceramic. Clever details are hidden throughout, like the time displayed on one laptop as “12:34:56 PM” and the letters on a keyboard reordered to spell “LOVE.” To generate these details, Buffett-Davis used her vast collection of rubber stamps —a tool of analog reproduction dating back to the 1860s³— which she pressed into the clay while damp. Similar to how banal images accumulate meaning when shared mimetically online, the varied collection of stamps used across the works drew our attention to the temporal relationship between clay, the computer, and the human project of collecting and sharing knowledge.

Stamped images also featured throughout 29 vibrant ceramic infographic posters hung on the back walls. Sprinkled with inspiring messages and silly images, they read like the collected digital detritus of a shared computer. On one poster, a screengrab of a Google search “how to…” lists suggested responses such as “kiss,” “draw,” “hack,” and “meditate” (Google Poster, 2024). In another poster, How Many Flashlights on Earth? (2024), the titular question is stamped into the clay alongside a carving of a flashlight. The flashlight’s beam has a glassy, liquid appearance, the alchemical result of vitrifying car safety glass during firing. Ephemeral online activity, including the screen’s light, is captured in these posters as an enduring totem. While archeologists a thousand years from now won’t find physical evidence of our digital activity, they could uncover this ceramic tablet. To the left of the table, a sign with red lettering reading “lending library” directed the viewer below to four shelves displaying a collection of handcrafted ceramic and wooden toys. While these items could not actually be taken from the exhibition, their lack of clear form or function conjures a space of experimental, open-ended play. This suggestion of participatory exchange reminds us that the computer is, in its essence, an interactive library of data where collective information is borrowed.

Deep engagement with materiality was present across each component of the installation—the evidence of Buffett-Davis gathering wood, scouring thrift stores for stamps, and laboring in the process of sculpting, drying, glazing, and firing the ceramics. In one of three laptop sculptures, the screen is glazed with a loose, purple-speckled rendition of Apple’s classic galaxy screensaver; in the center, a pop-up window displays a person carrying a stamped sign that says, “Just What We Wanted.” The phrase (also the work’s title) conjures the collective uneasiness around digital technologies: the prevailing sense that technocratic institutions and greater mechanization threaten human values, or at the very least feel toxic and disembodied. Yet, this adage might also apply to cuneiform, which brought us recorded language in the first place—is this world, the one we’ve created, just what we wanted?

While Just What We Wanted’s crafty materiality marks a stark contrast to the minimalist, mechanically produced Apple laptops that are ubiquitous in our lives, the difference might not be as vast as we think—one of the first materials used in computer manufacturing, silicon dioxide, mined from the earth as silica sand,⁴ is also found in the clay body Buffett-Davis used to create these sculptures. As she cuts down vintage rulers, glazes colorful screensavers, and stamps symbols and letters to create “keyboards,” Buffett-Davis’ handcrafted approach counters our current digitally disembodied state, underscoring the computer as a constructed, material object as well.

Each aspect of Computer Lab Loveseat cohered into a joyful, pedagogical environment that recalled the early, anticipatory promise of the World Wide Web, whose historic logo read “Let’s Share What We Know.” Computer for Two (2024), a laptop sculpture that includes two trackpads for users to surf the internet side by side, perhaps best embodies this value. By situating private screens in a public environment, Buffett-Davis reframes our interaction with these technologies as communal rather than solitary.

While clay may seem an unusual medium for reflecting upon our digital condition, Computer Lab Loveseat brought technology back to earth. Art, like the computer, is an assemblage of disparate, raw materials that when melded together form a portal to another world; even the word “digital” stems from the Latin “digitalis,” an attestation that human hands drive technology, not the other way around. Just as a computer “works” by transporting users into the interconnected temporal world of the internet, art works because of the transfer of knowledge and information from an artist’s mind into a static object and back into the mind of the viewer. BuffettDavis is clear that these are not replications of computers, but computers themselves —at the opening of the exhibition, when a child asked if the computers work, she responded, “Yes, just in a different way than we’re used to.”

This review was originally published in Carla issue 37.