In this special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, authors reflect on how, when and why art has been used to articulate destruction over the past decades. Their essays are a glimpse into the topics that were recently discussed at the 2013 Doomsday Clock Symposium in Washington, DC.
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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By Max Liboiron A long, long time ago, a younger, grubbier New York City dumped its trash on Barren Island off the south shores of Brooklyn. Barren Island was its own self-contained community and had a one-room school house, four saloons, and five factories boiling garbage all day, everyday. The buildings and island inhabitants–mostly immigrant […]
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*This is an edited transcript from the IDEAS City lecture on waste by Max Liboiron. Modern waste—that is, mid-20th to 21st century waste—is characterized by a few things. First, there is its tonnage– there is a lot of it, mostly industrial. About 98 percent of waste produced in the United States is industrial solid waste, […]
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By Max Liboiron. I want to be as surprised by my work as anyone else. For me, the joy in creating is that the creation takes on a life of its own. I am interested in exploring the intersection between art and life, between nature and artifice. – Heather Dewey Hardborg, artist In her much-lauded […]
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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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Guest post by Mathew Lippincott. Originally posted on Mediashift’s Idea Lab. Detritivores are creatures that consume decaying matter. Detritivore designs use abundant waste products to make scalable technology solutions. Unlike loftier concepts of zero-waste design such as Cradle to Cradle, Detritivore design accepts that the world is already loaded with discarded and broken technology. Detritivore designers need […]
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By Max Liboiron. “When I got to get the stuff in the bucket, first I go down the far left edge of the pile, dump it in. Then I go down the far right side of the pile, dump it in. Then I go down the middle. So everything fits in the back of the […]
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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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Basurama (trash-o-rama), a non profit organization based in Spain, is preparing a public waste audit for MIT’s Media Lab Festival on April 20th. Their unique point of intervention that goes above and beyond a regular waste audit and the goal of quantification and classification of waste, is how to represent two tons of waste. Basurama […]
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