In his “Deep Fried Gadgets” series, photographer Henry Hargreaves battered and fried some of his most prized technological possessions—a laptop, an iPod, an iPad, an external hard drive—and the weirdly enticing results were posted on Wired’s RAW File photography blog. “I was itching to deep fry some things that you wouldn’t usually find near a fryer and thought, ‘Why not start with my phone?’ I love creating strange cultural mash-ups,” Hargreaves wrote on the blog.

This isn’t just about what-if-I-put-my-iPhone-in-a-blender, however; no gadgets were actually harmed in the making of these images. Instead, the artist created mockups of foam-core and decorated them to look like the real products. From Hargreaves’ perspective, our country’s obsession with technology isn’t that much different from our obsession with fast food: “I see a connection between tech and fast food culture, both are fetishized, quickly consumed then discarded.”

Image: Henry Hargreaves © 2012