Knoetze explores connections between primary materials and social and geopolitical issues, with a particular interest in e-waste and its global circulation. The installation includes four videos filmed across Kinshasa, Dakar, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Karlsruhe and New York, and analyses our hyper-connected world as ‘a living, breathing network of malfunctioning computer systems; frantically attempting to update its drivers, restore its memory, and debug errors to avoid redundancy or a catastrophic crash’. The videos follow hybrid or cyborg protagonists between tech utopias and the mines and dumps these generate as a byproduct of their shimmering oases. They interrogate how knowledge monopolies produce ideological notions of progress that disregard and efface the historical and contemporary importance of Africa. The circle is closed in the last episode when one of the protagonists - a recomposed Boston Dynamic robot merged with an anthropomorphic mannequin - is sent to Dakar, where the story began, in a shipment of used electronics.