By Max Liboiron. Measurements are never mere faithful representations of nature, but have social and political origins and ramifications. In representational theory, measurement is “the correlation of numbers with entities that are not numbers,” a process of transformation, translation, and even interpretation at the level of sampling and gathering data. What is selected for measurement and what is […]
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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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By Max Liboiron. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers released their report on Global Food trends in anticipation of massive human population growth in the next 50 years. The trend that mattered most was the acute waste of nearly half the global food supply: Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. […]
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Reblogged from our friends at the fantastic Material World Blog. Aliine Lotman (Anthro Dept, EHI, Tallinn University) “Until the 19th century, the term ‘to consume’ was used mainly in its negative connotations of ‘destruction’ and ‘waste’. Tuberculosis was known as ‘consumption’, that is, a wasting disease. Then economists came up with a bizarre theory, which […]
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This is Dutch photographer Bas Princen’s staggering panorama of the Zabaleen settlement in Cairo, Egypt’s capital. These residents, living in an area known as garbage city, store, sort and recycle trash to earn their living. The photograph was included in the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and an exhibition at Storefront Art and Architecture in New […]
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RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) is a young yet accomplished project located within a construction waste recycling center in Philadelphia. They have twelve hours left in a fundraising campaign to open the trash-stream residency program to applications from artists in the Spring of 2013. They hope to hire staff with the money and become a […]
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Last night’s presentation of Surveying Waste and Capital at Trade School (NYC), lead by CUNY doctoral candidate Jesse Goldstein included a historical narrative starting in England during the enclosure movement and how the “wasteland,” originally referring to productive pasture and foraging land on the outskirts of a village’s agricultural fields, was reframed as “wasted spaces” […]
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This article was originally published by Max Liboiron in eTOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2010. In laymen’s terms, recycling is “good for the environment.” It involves “doing your bit” to help “save the Earth.” Yet recycling requires high expenditures of energy and virgin materials, and produces pollutants, greenhouse gases and waste; it creates […]
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By Max Liboiron The “universal” recycling symbol was designed in 1970 for a competition during America’s first Earth Day. A large producer of recycled paperboard, the Container Corporation of America, sponsored the competition. The winner was Gary Anderson, an urban design student in California, who said that he designed the symbol as a Mobius strip, […]
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Publication Deadline: 2012-07-18 (in 18 days) Boundaries introduces a call for papers on the following subject: «Re-Cycle Architecture». Recycle has to be intended here not as a new vague for aesthetic or marketing trends, but as re-use, “life cycle extension” for materials and objects. This new cycle affect the materiality of the existing, its functions […]
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Discard Studies 