One hallmark of a market-driven economy is efficiency, i.e. manufacturing a product at the lowest cost. However, some problems exist with always being driven to reduce cost. One problem is that Continue reading
Category Archives: Plastic
What we depend on so heavily and dispose of so quickly
What does a collection of plastic shopping bags have to do with choreographing a dance? For me there was a powerful connection—and in this post I want to explain how a material we associate with waste richly fueled a creative process. Continue reading
Plastics and Food Transport
I am currently in China as I start to write this. A student who was accompanying me as I visited a University brought up Continue reading
Plastics Recycling: A Global Overview
MSS Optical sorting machine
Humans are currently producing about 100 pounds of plastic per person per year on this planet (~250 pounds the US) and at the current rate of increase that number will be Continue reading
Earth Plasticity and Plasticity of Perception
One of my earliest memories as a freshman at UCLA took place in the front row of a cavernous, wood-paneled lecture hall equipped with a black-topped resin demonstration table. The class was Introductory Geology, and the professor a bearded, pony-tailed free spirit giddy with the anticipation of Continue reading
Life with Less Plastic (Plastic Waste, Part 2)
Written in collaboration with Tomoko Yoshida.
Our previous post provides an institutional view of our world’s current plastic waste problem. We showed how institutions in various sectors of society Continue reading
Plastic Waste (Part 1)
Written in collaboration with Tomoko Yoshida.
Plastic has become an integral part of our lives…. But with that has emerged the enormous—and growing—problem of plastic waste. Continue reading
Material of Our Time
I actually prefer plastic as a material because it is a material for our times. It represents the now. Ironically it is also ‘archival’, meaning in terms of its longevity it lasts over 100 years. This means that for art, it is a great material.
Claudia Hart (artist/sculptor), “Resolution, Reification,
and Resistance,” 3d Additivist Cookbook.
Not so long ago I had a conversation with a respected curator and gallery director about my research on Continue reading
Petro Pete, Plastic Mascot for Plausible Denial
In 2016, the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board (OERB) published the fourth volume of its “Petro Pete” series of illustrated children’s books. To promote Petro Pete’s Big Bad Dream, K-2 classes throughout the state were invited Continue reading
The Plastic Arts in the Anthropocene
Joseph Beuys, “7000 Oaks” adapted under CC A-SA 3.0 from Wikimedia Commons
This coming June, I will give a talk at the “Art in the Anthropocene” conference at Trinity College, Dublin about the sculptural theory of the German artist Joseph Beuys. I will discuss the theory’s implications for the politics and ethics of human action in the Anthropocene, implications imbricated with accusations that Beuys, a pilot in the Luftwaffe during World War II, harbored fascist tendencies in his working methods, which often involve the marshaling of large numbers of people in projects that Beuys grouped under the rubric “social sculpture.” Key for this talk, and for this post, will be a remark Beuys made in 1975 about plastic, so I wanted to use the occasion of this post to further some of my thinking about Beuys, particularly where it most intersects with our present focus on plastic.
Plastics and Animal Communication in the Anthropocene
Ubiquitous plastic in the environment is a hallmark of the Anthropocene (Waters et al. 2016). Wildlife routinely ingest, becoming entangled in, and are impaired by plastic pollution, creating a pressing global problem (e.g., Vegter et al. 2014). While undoubtedly an environmental crisis, these acute impacts are not my focus. I am interested in a more subtle phenomenon: Continue reading
What are plastics?
What are plastics?
All plastics are composed of carbon atoms connected to one another in a chain-like structure, with mostly or exclusively hydrogen atoms attached to the carbon atoms. Gasoline, candle wax and plastics all have this same structure; gasoline has Continue reading
Plastic
Plastiglomerate from Kamilo Beach displayed in the exhibition One Planet in Museon (The Hague, The Netherlands). Photo by Aaikevanoord.
Beginning last summer we started featuring a series of posts on the theme of perceiving the Anthropocene—so far, we have looked at objects or phenomena through which this colossal abstraction could be manifested to our senses. In one of my contributions I argued that a particularly good avatar of the Anthropocene is plastic. Plastic, I suggested, has an exemplary status in the Anthropocene as one of the most pervasive (and perhaps one of the more insidious) examples of the human transformation of nature. Continue reading
Inhabiting the Anthropocene 
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