Tara Donovan’s Stratagems takes thousands of recycled CDs to form reflective vertical sculptures

Got a spare 10,000 CDs lying around? Doubt it. Ever wondered what you could do with them if you did? Tara Donovan has an answer, and it’s currently installed at San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid Center through July. Her show Stratagems takes thousands of recycled compact discs and stacks them into vertical sculptures that catch light and shift throughout the day.

These are the physical remains of how we used to listen to music. Those silvered discs were once cutting-edge audio tech, the format that shaped how we consumed music for a solid two decades. Now they’re building blocks for something entirely different.

Donovan’s made a career out of taking everyday mass-produced stuff and piling it up until it becomes something else. Plastic cups, rubber bands, drinking straws, you name it. The CDs work perfectly for this approach, except they come with baggage. They’re not just objects, they’re relics of a specific moment in time. These things once held entire record collections, DJ sets, albums that soundtracked entire movements.

The installation sits in the glass Annex gallery at the Transamerica Pyramid Center, where the sculptures play off the building’s vertical lines and reflective surfaces. As light moves across the city during the day, the pieces shift and reconfigure. It’s kind of like watching a set respond to a room in real time.

ICA SF operates without a permanent space, dropping contemporary art into different contexts around the city. Putting Stratagems in the Transamerica Pyramid Center isn’t random. The sculptures need this relationship with the architecture to really work. They mirror the building while simultaneously doing their own thing.

If you’ve spent time in music culture, there’s another angle here. CDs carried electronic music into the mainstream, from early rave compilations through to everything that followed. They represented a particular way of engaging with music that’s now been almost completely replaced by streaming. Watching them transformed into light-catching sculptures instead of sound-carrying discs is a bit surreal.

The title Stratagems is about tactics and calculation. The tactic here is the transformation. What was meant to be heard becomes something to look at, what was designed for your bedroom becomes a public installation, what was once technology becomes art material.

There’s no sentimentality in the work. Donovan treats these materials the same way she treats everything else, as components in a system. The sculptures aren’t asking you to get misty-eyed about the death of physical media. They’re just showing you what happens when you take something and give it a completely different job.

Standing in that glass space watching these towers of recycled CDs catch afternoon light, you’re basically looking at the question of what happens to cultural objects after their moment passes. These discs once held music that mattered to people, that defined scenes and nights and entire eras. Now they’re something else.

Stratagems runs through 31 July 2026 at the Transamerica Pyramid Center’s Annex gallery, 600 Montgomery Street, San Francisco. Details at icasf.org/exhibitions/59-stratagems

by Decoded Magazine

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