Dev Harlan is a self-taught, New York-based artist working in sculpture, installation and digital media, tracing how technology moves from raw mineral to discarded relic embedded in Earth's strata.,Harlan grew up in Silicon Valley, left school for the dot-com boom in San Francisco, and later returned to study Earth Science at Columbia University.
Early work drew on video programming, hardware hacking and repurposed discarded technology, an approach Harlan describes as lacking a critical framework at the time. After moving to New York, Harlan shifted the practice toward sculpture and large-scale video projection, and took an influential course with American Artist at the School for Poetic Computation. A residency at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona introduced casting and 3D scanning of desert rock formations, an engagement deepened by later residencies in Joshua Tree.
In Hegemony of Screensavers (Artifacts), Harlan pairs digital brushstrokes referencing computer screensavers with 3D scans of rocks and technological debris, arguing that digital formalism ignores the physical extraction and waste that underpins all technology.The Afterlives and Plus Basalt series continue this juxtaposition of minerals and discarded electronics, tracing how technology becomes part of the Earth's geological strata after use.
In The Dithering, presented by Fakewhale on Verse in December 2024, Harlan reconstructs pages from the 1990 IPCC Assessment Report inside an emulated 1990s Macintosh operating system, generating algorithmic works that combine strange attractor models, satellite imagery and text. The series takes its title from Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312, which described “decades of dithering” in the face of escalating climate change.
