Before disposability, before planned obsolescence, and even before mass production really entered its modern phase, there reined a different kind of material relation with broken objects. Waste historian Susan Strasser calls this ethos “stewardship,” characterized by handwork, repair, and making do: “We are not likely to revive the stewardship of objects and materials, formed in […]
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By Max Liboiron. I suspect, that like me, urban followers of the Discard Studies blog spend a lot of time looking down. There is a lot of interesting trash on sidewalks, roads, and gutters, and now there is a place to share your awareness with the world (provided you have a smart phone): Litterati, the […]
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*This post originally appeared on Cyborgology. Objects have lives. They are witness to things. –This American Life, “The House on Loon Lake” Atlantic Cities’ feature on the psychology of “ruin porn” is worth a look–in part because it’s interesting in itself, in part because it features some wonderful images, and in part because it has […]
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There’s an adage is discard studies that although we throw things “away,” there really is no such place. The ocean has been a convenient “away” for centuries, the idea being that the vast quantities of water can dilute anything, and its status as a last frontier makes it “ideal” for nuclear waste deposits and other waste. The ocean is […]
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“The past…is constantly being broken down and reintegrated into the present…” (Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local, p.85). This is a photograph I took recently of the twisted, rusted metal that forms the centerpiece of the memorial park in the small New Jersey town I live in. Surrounded by greenery, the monolithic steel was […]
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The Gallery of Lost Art is an online exhibition via the Tate Modern that explores the materiality, nature, biography and archive of missing works of art.The website explains: Destroyed, stolen, rejected, erased, ephemeral. Some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost, and can no longer be seen. Some artworks […]
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A new series on The Thread Radio has a new series on storage, a topic near and dear to discard researcher’s heart, as it is both the opposite of discarding (archiving) but also its corollary, as discards must be stored. We’ve probably all stated more than once “there is no ‘away.’” So it is no […]
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By Max Liboiron. That’s right, diving for digital waste, not e-waste. We are familiar with curbside scavengers and recycling programs for electronic hardware, but how do you dumpster dive all those deleted files, those 1’s and 0’s you drag to your desktop bin every day? What about upcylcing digital waste? This is where Dumpster Drive […]
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By Max Liboiron One topic we rarely post about on Discard Studies is the connection between power and forced acts of waste. Robert Moses’s aggressive eviction-based freeways in the 1960s, landlord sponsored arson in Harlem and the Bronx in the 1970s, and, as of Monday, the forcible eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park […]
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e-misférica 9.1 —On the Subject of Archives (Invited editors: Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor) e-misférica invites artist/activist presentations, review essays and reviews (books, films, performance, visual arts) for its Summer 2012 issue, entitled On the Subject of Archives. More than a repository of objects or texts, the archive is also the process of selecting, ordering, […]
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