He’s Just Had Coffee

In Metal phone, Schulze & Webb outline a vision-logic appreciation of the mobile phone as a space-time contour:

The Nokia 5140i is an illusory object. Disconnected from the network when you’re underground, it becomes a lump of plastics and metals. Although safe in your hands, you wouldn’t want to eat the components. It, too, would lose its shape in an oven—in time, it would break apart anyway.
The appearance of solid edges to this phone – in time, space, and the market-place – is maintained at great effort. The Nokia is a brief confluence in the flows of all these materials, held in place by utilising glues, factories, the entire knowledge of the behaviour of plastics; college degrees and health and safety and insistence marketing has on a handset (rather than separate pieces) in the first instance.
The mobile phone acts as a thing because material science and market forces make it a thing. Consumer electronics do not drop into the world formed like rocks and trees. They exist because of human endeavour.

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