10.16.09 post

Did: -playing on beach, experimenting (3 hrs)
-edited photos (1/2 hr)
-research, found more artists (Ha Schult, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang, Claudia Borgna), found Antennae (a great online magazine), contacted scuba club (2 hrs)
-organized plastic research into a word document w/ links to articles (1 hr)
-continued editing project proposal (1 hr)
-collected milk cartons from Beanster's and began cutting them up into pieces for installation (2 hrs).

Discovered: I found more helpful articles about plastic pollution at www.innovations-report.com. I watched a video that Erica recommended on trash "Buy Your Garbage Back?".
I found a few artists working with garbage. Ha Schult creates life size "trash people" and then installs them at different locations all over the world. Tim Noble & Sue Webster use piles of trash to create silhouettes.

Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang, collect trash on Kehoe Beach and use it to create art... here is a collection of plastic cheese spreaders that they have found over a 10 year period


I discovered Antennae magazine which featured an article about artist Claudia Borgna.

Claudia Borgna's work has an extremely similar aesthetic to the installations I have had in mind:

Borgna writes, "In the past years I have been looking at how rubbish and man made objects are very much transforming and creating new landscapes and becoming more and more integrated into nature... the plastic bags are a human creation and therefore natural appendix of man. One could argue that whatever is man made is natural and that ultimately nature is an unstable and unreliable human construction ruled by social and cultural needs."


As I researched plastics I found lots of interesting or poetic descriptions of the plastic problem:

"In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments."

"We were looking at a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments-a plastic-plankton soup."

"Our photographers captured underwater images of jellyfish hopelessly entangled in frayed lines, and transparent filter feeding organisms with colored plastic fragments in their bellies."

"In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch most of the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean."

These phrases that I keep coming across have influenced my ideas about the direction my project could take. I like the idea of illustrating these phrases and statistics from scientific research and reports. My installations would reflect different sentences or descriptions that I isolate from my research. In that way they could become a narrative about the process of plastic. Text may become an important component... Ultimately I could re-envision scientific research and show people what is really happening outside of the context of dry scientific reports and data.

Do: After organizing my research I would like to make a list of the quotes/phrases that I think would be interesting to illustrate. I also want to get a lot of work done on the installation I have in mind using pieces of milk cartons. I think this installation would explain the process of the break-down of plastic particles once the enter the water. I WANT TO MAKE THINGS AND PHOTOGRAPH THEM UNDERWATER. yay!