e-Galaxy was first presented at the State Library of Queensland,
in the Knowledge Walk, in January 2025.

It is an immersive installation built together with children, adults and people passing by, who joined artist Suzon Fuks to pull apart old computers and e-waste, and transformed them into a giant galaxy that revealed the intricate circuitry that powers our daily lives.

music Bob Vanderbob

Keith Armstrong wrote:

Suzon’s work aptly challenges one of the most seductive myths peddled by the electronics and IT industry that somehow media transcends physical materiality – given its reliance on electricity, projected light, and flickering pixels. This myth of immaterial media literally explodes into a cosmos of electronic hardware in the presence of one of Suzon’s extraordinary E-Galaxy installations. And better still, we get to do our own disassembly to really dissect the innards of today’s sleek shiny boxes of toxicity! She rapidly teaches us through this work that this is the tricky challenge that we face – to bring the disastrous environmental consequences of media industries to account in ways that are robustly critical of their pre-planned waste and obsolescence. And of course, also remember that media industries are profoundly entangled with other modes of production: the extraction of raw materials becoming components of beloved devices, and the purgatorial conditions of workers who assemble them in countries out of sight and mind.

Just maybe then arts-based projects like E-Galaxy can bring us to our senses through seductive sensory, aesthetic experience, questioning and discussion? Maybe it can help lead us towards some form of ecological politics and communication that would give us the compass we so desperately lack? Ultimately E-Galaxy reminds us that there are better ways that privilege more than few – and that our futures must also be redesigned with the good of nonhuman participants and quite literally, the earth itself in mind.

I was privileged to experience a preview of this work at State Library of Qld this year, and to witness not only the highly positive response of Suzon’s audiences, but also the care and attention that she took to frame the events, laced with her longstanding and renowned performative sensibility – rendering the whole experience extremely reflective and fulfilling. Furthermore, her work reminded me that the increasing obsolescence of our bodies are set in a world framed by endless sitting, tapping and staring – no doubt with that trance allowing us to be manipulated by the smoke and mirrors horror story of mega media companies dominating our politics with their ferocious, self-centred philosophies. There are urgent questions to be answered around media – and this suggests more powerful reasons for supporting this excellent work.