Crime & Safety

Zuckerberg's Trash Becomes Contemporary Art

Artist digs through the trash of Silicon Valley elite, including Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and yes, Mark Zuckerberg.

Somebody's been digging through the trash of Silicon Valley big wigs, and it ain't racoons.

XVALA, the artist behind the 'Fear Google' stickers, went diving through tech founders' personal trash in Palo Alto to "create a series of sculptures that has been made available to the public online and in upcoming gallery shows," according to a statement by Cory Allen Contemporary Art (CACA).

"Dumpster Diving Silicon" is a series of sculptures made of the materials scrounged by XVALA from the trash bins of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales.

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The statement says that XVALA found a range of objects at the residencies, "from random objects such as medical waste, adult and hygiene products, empty booze bottles to spreadsheets, hair clippings, and typical household items."

Cory Allen, reached by phone this afternoon, said XVALA was never arrested while on his mission. "He had a close call with some cops and other than that it was pretty easy," he said.

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XVALA was able to find the home addresses of the founders easily on Google Maps, using his iPad, Allen said.

The first sculpture, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Not Very Well Hung Hanger”, depicts a phallic shape made from a coat hangar allegedly retrieved from Mark Zuckerberg's trashcan and painted blue. It is only a small preview of even more provocative sculptures currently being made in XVALA's studio, Allen said.

“The Zuck hanger is harmless compared to the remaining sculptures that we are releasing this month,” said Allen.  “Personally, I think we all have things that we throw away that we don’t want people to connect back to us.”

The sculpture is not a hoax, Allen said via phone today, and will be appearing in galleries as soon as they can finalize arrangements. He mentioned Hacker Dojo as one interested venue.

“I wanted to ‘expose’ Zuckerberg like he exposes Facebook users, daily,” said XVALA in the announcement.

“Facebook has the potential to air everyone’s dirty laundry – and does," said Cory Allen, who said he himself is not the same person as XVALA.

The series is attempting to make the comment that "by having fun with Zuckerberg by showing the world his personal trash in a provocative and artistic way,” according to the statement.

“I’m trying to glean from Mark Zuckerberg for personal advancement the same way Zuckerberg gleans information from Facebook users for his own personal gain,” said XVALA.

A gallery video, created by CACA, demonstrates an image compilation of the dumpster diving series in the making, and can be found in the sidebar of this story.


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