Like the legendary Silicon Valley “garage,” “Beta Space” serves as an experimental laboratory for artists, collaborative ventures, and catalytic ideas. In the second installment of this new exhibition series, the Bay Area’s dual passions for high-tech innovation and green initiatives combine.

Artist Anna Sew Hoy will create a new sculptural installation using cast-off materials and detritus from our local corporate culture. In Silicon Valley, start-up companies pop up and disappear on a steady basis, while established firms regularly upgrade IT inventory and office fixtures. How can electronic and office equipment be critical to the function of an organization one day and useless the next? Sew Hoy (who has long worked with found objects and everyday materials such as jeans and beer cans) will recycle—and take inspiration from—our communal, locally sourced e-waste.

For her “Beta Space” project, Sew Hoy will partner with Green Mouse Recycling of San Jose to give a second life to discarded computer cords, mice, and other manufactured desktop gadgets. For Sew Hoy, such familiar, mundane materials are “hooks”: she transforms them into abstract components with oddly fetching texture, shape, and color. She explains:

My work combines handmade elements with ubiquitous bits from contemporary life. The slowness of the handmade collides with symbols of speedy communication and global junk, creating culturally totemic forms. As our world becomes more industrialized and corporate, I want my sculptures to point towards a daily ritual of making and using hand-crafted things, even as they acknowledge mass-consumption.