Information Salvage
These are the lessons we have learned in efforts to salvage neglected information in the form of narrative fragments salvaged from the waste stream. Our working laboratory is a comprehensive community waste reduction centre.
Category Archives: Museums/Collections
“The Dregs of the Library”: Trashing the Occupy Wall Street Library
When our library at Occupy Wall Street was destroyed, we used our beloved books tactically, as evidence, and then used the trauma of destruction to make a case for the illegitimacy of the violence committed when the library was destroyed. How do we voice and give and hear testimony when things we care for that are discarded?
A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is just one among many moments in time when new scientific objects have altered humanity’s relationship to the past, present, and future. Scientific objects such as fossils, radioactivity, genetic mutations, toxic pesticides, and ice cores, to name a few, have precipitated different narratives and imaginings of the human past and the human future. What might a cabinet of curiosities for the age of the Anthropocene look like?
A floating cabinet of contaminated curiosities launches 6/28
Artist Paul Lloyd Sargent launches Artificial Corridors, a project to pilot a 19-foot, open-hulled powerboat, to navigate across the New York State Canal System and down the Hudson River, and to transport a cargo comprised of remnants of the Great Lakes Basin’s toxic legacy.
Archaeogaming and punk archeology in discard studies
Archaeogaming is as much about exploring and conducting archaeology within gaming environments (virtual space) as it is about understanding the history of video games in the real world (meat space).
What are the frontiers in discard studies that would benefit from punk archeology?
Arrested Decay: The Exorcism of an American Ghost Town
Bodie, California is a ghost town. Or rather, it was a ghost town—now it is a historic park and tourist destination. It endures in a state of “arrested decay,” meaning that nothing can be newly constructed onsite, but neither are its standing buildings permitted to deteriorate any further. The state of California has suspended the town in its process of ruination, stabilizing its entropy and halting its decline. If its decay is forestalled, its grounds rigorously maintained and its aesthetic carefully cultivated, can it be called a ghost town any longer?
Not scrap metal
“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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Gallery of Lost Art: A Treasure Trove of Discard Techniques
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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CFP: History and Cultural Representations of Human Remains
Call for Papers: History and Cultural Representations of Human Remains Conferences Medical Museums and Anatomic Collections at the Natural History Museum, Toulouse, on 4 February, 2013 Anatomic Models at the Academy of Medicine, Paris, on 4 April, 2013 Exhibiting Human Remains at the Hunterian Museum, London, on 4 June, 2013 Although modern anatomy owes a […]
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