Maddie Butler with HereIn

IMG_4548.m4v (I want you), 2025, E-waste, inkjet prints, resin, paint, 16.25 x 9.75 x 2.75 in. Photo: Daniel Lang.

Currently finishing her MFA at the University of of California San Diego, Maddie Butler explores the intersection of technology and human communication with mixed-media works that conjure the relationship between, as she says, "skin and screen.” Butler spoke with HereIn Editor Elizabeth Rooklidge about intimacy, pessimism, and how we project fantasy onto the fragment. 

HereIn: Maddie, how do you like to describe your material and conceptual interests? 

Maddie Butler: Moving image is really the formal and theoretical grounding of my work, and then collage is how I describe my material process – gathering and arranging shapes to create my own scenes or narratives. So even though the final form might be sculptural or a work on paper, it always ties back to these (in my mind) cinematic questions of mediated representation and communication. I think what I'm trying to do is tease out types of mediation and understand them as mechanisms of ideology. I look at media technology specifically as this site of intersection between the personal (the internal, the bodily) and the external (the other, the state). So it's about systems of power and culture and intimacy and identity and the devices that bring these things together. How do they influence one another? How do we shape the tools? And then how do the tools shape us?

IMG_1400.m4v (blizzard cigarette), 2025, E-waste, inkjet prints, resin, paint, 7.75 x 2.25 x 12 in. Photo: Daniel Lang.

HereIn: It feels to me like at this point in time—for extremely legitimate reasons—a lot of the conversation around this set of questions is very doom and gloom. I don’t get that sense from your work. 

Butler: No, well, I have had people say it seems pessimistic. But I’ve also had people tell me they connect to it in a really positive way. I think a lot of how people interpret the work is a projection of their personal relationship to digital media.  

HereIn: That’s so interesting. I don't get pessimism from it. It’s something I'm pretty attuned to because I feel like, especially with social media, I'm often kind of this apologist—yes, all of these things go horribly wrong, but the way they open up the world for people in certain situations is invaluable. And it feels like frequently that gets lost in the conversation. 

Butler: Yeah, they can be beautiful. I use these tools, I rely on them every day. There are a lot of relationships that I wouldn't have without them. I used to worry that I wasn’t being critical enough of these technologies or the systems of wealth, power, extraction they are intertwined with. But the impetus of the work isn’t criticality, necessarily. It stems from a desire to more deeply understand human emotional and social experiences as they are shaped by these forces. There is a critique there but it is enacted through curiosity and through a feminist reclaiming of the technological artifact.

IMG_1255.m4v (first snow), 2025, E-waste, inkjet prints, resin, paint, 13 x 9.5 x 1.5 in. Photo: Daniel Lang.

This conversation of the apparatus within my work is something that's only happened in the last five years or so. My core interest has always been interpersonal relationships and the imprecision of communication and intersubjectivity. And the focus on digital tools has come into play as more and more of our relationships are mediated by and dependent on them. 

I want to avoid the aesthetics of  “high-tech”— of the digital being separate from the body, being sleek, being immaterial. That's associated with big tech and tech bro culture and also with sci-fi and spaces of unreality, this sort of dystopic, techno-futurism vibe. So I embrace the messiness, the greasy fingerprint smudge on the screen, the crumbs and guts of the unmade apparatus, it recenters the body and the human within these devices and reminds the viewer of the labor and materiality that has been deliberately obscured by the creators of these machines. 

IMG_2925.m4v (wild horses blue), 2025, E-waste, inkjet prints, resin, paint, 5  x 9 x .75 in. Photo: Daniel Lang.

I make actual collages on paper a lot, but then I also think of collage as a metaphor for a kind of information processing, for video editing and more widely for contemporary habits media consumption. The way we are moving through the physical and digital world today, it's scanning. It's like gathering and rearranging and then aggregating and taking these pieces and arranging them into a configuration that makes sense to you or that you can see patterns in. There’s infinite availability, infinite information, infinite variation. So then the question isn’t, like, how do I look at this singular object and understand the relationships within it? It’s, how do I look at this mass of things in relationship to one another and then make meaning that way?

Unzip, 2024, television parts, inkjet prints, acetate, hardware, LED light, 6 x 48 x 3 in. Photo: Cuyler Ballenger.

HereIn: In many of these works, like IMG_4548.m4v (I want you), there’s this idea of infinite information but then you have one image repeated in a way that feels… captured? Tell me a bit more about how you’re including images in these. 

Butler: This body of work is a continuation of a show I did last year called Zip File, which used this archive of images that I took off of my old Facebook account. Those photos were taken between 2007 and 2011 of my small group of friends, taken with a point and shoot digital camera that I no longer have access to. I rediscovered these online and printed them, so brought them into a physical space for the first time. They had only ever existed in the digital realm. And then I collaged them onto computer monitor and television components that I got for free from sites like Facebook Marketplace from people who wanted to get rid of these broken or outdated technologies but didn’t know how to properly dispose of them or couldn’t be bothered.  And this series incorporated hundreds of images, it felt like opening up a time capsule and re-creating a time that was not so many years ago but in terms of a technological timeline it was ages ago. There was a tension in how the flimsy paper images were molded onto the computer parts, like the forms were mutually creating one another. 

IMG_2925.m4v (wild horses brown), 2025, E-waste, inkjet prints, resin, paint, 7 x 3 x 3.25 in. Photo: Daniel Lang.

So the gestures in this new body of work are the same but the types of components I'm using, the archive of images I'm using and the relationship between the two are different. This show is mostly built out of printer parts and disassembled iPhones. The images, all taken on an iPhone, are actually stills from videos, which is hinted at in the titles (they all end in .m4v). They’re from this collection of videos that I took over a ten-year period, all of one person who I'm no longer in touch with, but who I used to be close with. I originally started collecting these videos because I was interested in how a viewer could start to intuit a relationship between the two of us through the way that I filmed this person. Even though I'm never physically in the videos, there's a lot of information just in how I made this person into a subject. And also I was struck by how time was marked by the changing appearance of the person but also by the changing quality of the image as I upgraded my phone. I don’t know if all of this backstory is visible in the work but it’s part of the trajectory of how I ended up here, haha. So these stills are printed, sometimes re-photographed or manually altered, zoomed in and out and basically just moved back and forth between screen and irl space many times, degrading their quality and embedding them with artifacts of use. 

And then I collage them into printer components. I’m interested in the printer as a space of mediation between the physical and the digital, so much media today remains in a virtual space and it’s important for me to make things tactile, take an archive that exists in pixels or 1’s and 0’s and actually assign it a haptic quality. Because the effects are real, the effects on our minds and souls and material realities. 

In Zip File I was collaging the images on top of the computer parts and folding the paper around the metal and plastic components. Whereas with this one, the photos have resin on top of them, so they're much more entombed or enshrined. It looks shinier and nicer, but it's also more suffocated. The images have less agency in this variation than in the last one. Maybe it's an effort to end my obsessiveness over them.

IMG_2183.m4v (see-saw), 2025, E-waste, inkjet prints, paint, marker, 12 x 2.25 x 3.75 in. Photo: Daniel Lang.

HereIn: This might feel out of left field, and it’s totally coming from my own art historical interests over the years, but to me it feels like there’s a relationship between these works and reliquaries. I don’t know if that’s something anybody’s ever brought up?

Butler: Nobody’s brought it up, but I can definitely see it. I’m thinking about containers for (corrupted, inaccurate, subjective) memories or containers for relationships that have passed. They’re definitely like these little memory shrines, honoring the image but also the technologies that created it and sort of becoming their own machines in the process.  

HereIn: I think about people I’ve lost, how photos of them exist mostly on my phone. They’re really far back in my camera roll now. They’re like digital evidence of my memories, but preserved on a precarious device. And sometimes those memories are difficult. 

Butler: Yes totally, I was thinking about all of this. These photos or charged memories will just pop up in a slideshow on your homescreen. These images become ghosts and become separated from the actual person or the actual relationship, and then they take on their own power. In the language of psychoanalysis they become shadow figures. I personally am very susceptible to this, to attaching all this projection and fantasy to a fragment. A lot of my work is trying to identify and untangle these different modes of perception. 

This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.