Mitchell Joachim

Consume a take-out dinner, purchase a pair of sneakers, or read a magazine, and
you’re soon confronted with a disconcerting amount of waste. The United States is the
earth’s number-one creator of garbage. Each American tosses out 4.5 pounds every
day. The typical citizen produces 102 tons of junk across a lifetime and $50 billion in
squandered resources are moved to the curbside yearly. This is just the preliminary
point for an enigmatic and expensive voyage that may also characterize the greatest
unexploited prospect of the 21st century. But litter is also an international issue; the
Pacific Ocean is currently six times more profuse with plastic discarded materials than
zooplankton. How did we generate with this nonsensical amount of garbage, and what
can we do about it? This course envisions the creation, control, and clearance of junk
as a vibrant social spectacle that can advance awareness into a wide-ranging series of
inquiries at the juncture of ecology and urbanization. Generally, unloading garbage’s
profound civil and societal magnitudes affords an acute deliberation on cities,
communal associations of disparity, global economic processes, and people’s
relationships to nature. The course will use data visualization to unearth the history of
rubbish treatment from the 1800s to the present, isolating the roots of today’s wasteaddicted culture. Also data will be used to draws links between contemporary industrial
production, consumer society, and our disposable lifestyle. We will examine
contentious subjects like the politics of recycling and the export of refuse to poor
nations while proposing a powerful argument for massive change. A large segment of
the course will involve multiple site visits to Freshkills Park, Newtown Creek Digester
Eggs, Sims Material Recovery Facility and more. Specific topics will include: the role of
data visualization in patterns of waste production and complex geographies;
perceptions of contamination overriding debates on sustainability and ecological cities;
new kinds of material tracking technologies; mapping of global surplus and flow of
goods; the transformation objects from cradle to cradle; and garbage as sculptural art.
Texts may include authors such as, Benjamin Miller, Robin Nagle, Heather Rogers,
William McDonough, Annie Leonard, and others.