project proposal & proof of concept

1. BUILT TO LAST
project proposal & proof of concept

4. The future is plastic.
• A disposable/throwaway culture
• Planned obsolescence
• Our relationships with the objects around us
• The rise of a material, object-centric culture

5. The plastisphere
• The scale of marine pollution from plastic debris
• Microplastics: Plastic doesn’t decompose - it breaks
down into smaller and smaller pieces
• Pacific Ocean Garbage Vortex / The Five Gyres
Why it matters.
• Breakdown of plastic into hazardous materials
• Plastic acts as a “ship” carrying invasive species over
long distances
• Plastic enters the food chain and ends up on our
plates.

6. My questions
• What does it mean to live in a material culture,
an object-centric culture?
• Why do we cherish some physical objects
(“our most prized possessions”) and feel
perfectly fine throwing others away?
• Amnesia surrounding single-use plastics?

8. The aims
I want to challenge cultural notions of
disposability and place its impacts into a global
context.
I want to encourage participants/viewers to
examine their own relationships with the physical
objects in their lives. I want them to think about
the things they love - and the things they throw
away.

9. The project
My project will be an archive of 3D images of my
trash. I will collect all the plastic I throw away over a
period of time and create an online archive of each
item, using photogammetry to make 3D portraits of
the objects.
Using Unity, 360 video/photography, and audio, I will
locate these piece of trash in different environments/
landscapes (the beach, the ocean, a banquet, a
disposal heap).

10. Using photogammetry to create a 3d portrait of trash.

11. Alejandro Duran
Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape

12. Gregg Segal
“Segal decided to
photograph family, friends,
neighbors and anyone
else willing posing with a
week's worth of their
accumulated trash. He
instructed his
photographic subjects to
save everything—from
banana peels to
recyclables—and to bring
it over to his house at the
end of the week.”

13. Mary Mattingly, OWN-IT.US

14. Natalia Cabrera Figueroa, Trashland

15. Getting there
• Experts: 5Gyres, field researchers
• Survey of peers

16. Sketches

17. When we try to pick out anything by
itself we find that it is bound fast by a
thousand invisible cords that cannot be
broken, to everything in the universe.
- John Muir

18. Questions?