Sustainable Practices at ITP | Class / Throw Close

To throw something away means to get it out of sight, and subsequently out of mind. Throw away. It's an odd twist of linguistics that has become so us as to be invisible when heard, much like the phrase "hurry up." What does it mean? When taken literally, "throw it away" becomes:

"take that thing and manually propel it with force through the air to another place that is not here."

It is much to easy to throw things away. Most of the products we buy on a day to day basis are manufactured with this telos in mind. Paper coffee cups, plastic grocery bags, and syrofoam microchip packaging are all intended to fulfill their one-time purpose, then it's off to that great-big landfill in the sky.

But that great and big landfill is not in the sky. It's in Fresh Kills. That's a problem. Since what set this train of thought in motion was grammer taken for granted, I suggest we similarly look at our waste with the same twisted face.

Here's the idea:

produce tangible-media data visualisation projects using the medium of everyday trash on the 4th Floor of the Tisch building at NYU. What do we use so often and throw away so often that it becomes invisible? How can we make it impactfully visible once more?

I suggest we start with a coffee cup day.

We're ITP students. We know how to program microcontrollers and mobile phones, and we know how to design websites and ->user interactions, we know how to re-appropriate the cutting-edge to make it interesting and engaging, and...we know ->how to not sleep and drink plenty of coffe and tea. I would like to know ITP's daily cup output.

Starting next week, I plan to set up a space where an evolving growing sculpture can forment and be fed by more of its ->own, cups. Any cup you sip out during the day. Paper. Plastic. Glass. The way to make this work and have an impact, ->I believe is to represent the output of cups in an iteresting way. I suggest they become a wall covering. A slow ->consumables fungi that grows througout the week from user added submissions.

perhaps we line them all up end to end.
perhaps I invite the makeup of the floor to stash their trash in my locker as a way to measuer volume by another metric
perhaps this evovles into a series | differnt trash every week / different implementation every week

Simply put - don't throw it away - throw it close - see what happens.

if you have any thoughts about this idea, please feel free to post it here or e-mail me at untitle [at] mac [dot] com.

A few things to add to this idea:

It's not just the cups we're dealing with, it's the leftover liquid in the cups. I suggest having a reservoir of some sort into which the excess liquid gets dumped to dramatize the amount of wasted water as well.
This is a good illustration, but also one that will irk some people. Be prepared for that. Don't shy away from it, but use it as a chance to win the irked over through discussion.
Come up with a plan for disposing of the sculpture properly when you've made your point. Nothing's worse than suposedly eco-ventionist artwork that adds to the problem.
Perhaps separation of materials could be part of the sculpture's aesthetic. This makes disposal easier, and makes a point about materials, not just general waste. For example, perhaps cups are surrounded by bottles are surrounded by cans? I'd suggest monitoring the sculpture during the day and re-arranging it for best effect as you go.

tigoe

Stump by Natalie Jeremijenko might be of interest. The program counts the number of pages consumed by the printer; when the equivalent of a tree in pulp has been consumed it automatically prints out a slice of a tree. http://xdesign.ucsd.edu/mainmenu/projectarchive2.html