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A performance based installation exploring the notion of choice in the age of excess.

The three thousand videos present in the installation compile around ten thousand hours of viewing time. Watching just over two and a half hours of videos a day it would take ten years to view them all. Spending eight hours a day, Monday to Friday for a month, will only account for about two percent of the available viewing.

Yet this whole collection could be digitalized and stored on a multi-terabyte hard drive no bigger than just one of these videos. The fact that we can store so much information now on drives, devices and now in the ‘cloud’ means the physical presence of our choices has altered.

Many people are now downloading more music and video each day than they actually view. Sure these files are easy to access, and portable, but we still only have so many hours in the day to watch or listen to them. Does having so much choice actually enhance our lives, or are we creating stress and anxiety for ourselves?

This installation investigates these issues by exploiting the medium of videocassette tapes. They are a format that most people alive today can relate to and understand. You only have to pick one up to know if it is a short, medium or long length of tape, which we know equates to several minutes up to several hours of viewing.

To accentuate the dilemma of choice the videos have all been labeled the same. The viewer can watch whatever they like, though won’t really know what, until the video is played. There is also no remote control, compelling the viewer to make the extra effort, enabling the choice to seem more existent. Perhaps the greater the effort, and the less choice we have, the more we will appreciate what we have.

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This bowl is made from plastic coathangers woven together and simply held together in tension. It plays with the ideas of form and function, and the contemporary obsession with repurposing obsolete products into überobsolete products. The essential form and strength of the coathangers are subtly manipulated while still retaining their original purpose. The bowl can be deconstructed and the coathangers used once again. The bowl, without any real function, questions the ongoing need to create more new products, which seems only matched by the need to create more new categories for rubbish. But rubbish is as rubbish does. With so much already made, the first question the twenty-first century designer, living in a world of diminishing resources, must ask themselves, is: Do I really need to make this?

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Bloom is made from over 12,000 plastic lids zip-tied together to form over sixty organic shapes. The pieces were floated together on the Derwent River at the Glenorchy Arts and Sculpture Park (GASP) for the Flotilla project as part of the biennial Glenorchy Works Festival.

The plastic tops used are typically discarded without a thought, end up in landfill, and are rarely recycled. But because they float they also have a great chance of circulating in waterways if discarded inappropriately. Placing these plastic tops in a seemingly precarious position in the natural environment created an uneasy tension provoking conversation and interest about how the way we live and consume impacts on the local environment. Working with the inherent shape and colours of the plastic tops created a bloom effect mimicking the natural environment in which it was placed.

The new GASP boardwalk is situated on the Derwent River, and has given many people a new perspective on the river environment, allowing them to consider what it is that is coming into the river from our built environment. However, the foreshore is not a natural state as such, with much of the original shoreline being reclaimed, and the boardwalk dissecting water and land. So while the plastic tops seem out of place in 'nature', they create a playful interruption between the natural and built environments.

There is a great amount of interest in plastic pollution and particularly the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. However, we can easily overlook that much of the plastic that ends up in the ocean started out in a waterway after being discarded inappropriately within the built environment. Plastic is now a much-maligned material accumulating around us, and although it originates from petrochemicals derived from oiled formed from living matter buried millions of years ago, it does not break down into the environment like scientists once believed it would.

The artwork is fundamentally a re-presentation of post-consumer materials, but it is certainly created with intention and attention to an art-form; it isn’t simply a pile of rubbish tipped into the river. Although the latter could create intense reactions and conversations about consumerism and the environment, it could also be divisive and inaccessible. Creating an aesthetically pleasing and playful artwork, however, can be interesting and accessible, allowing an opportunity to contemplate issues that are in fact deadly serious.

Photograph by Lucia Rossi

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dematerialization /de-muh-teer-ree-uhl-ize-shuhn/ n. 1. materials that mysteriously appear in shops, are used briefly, then seemingly disappear without a trace. 2. materials that do not matter [Latin: related to: de DOES NOT, materia MATTER]

The idea behind this installation was to juxtapose materials we value, with materials we give little value to. It is simply a travesty the amount of clothing that goes to landfill each week even in a small city, like Hobart.  The ONO Project, curated by Kate Kelly and Pip Stafford, held at the derelict baths building on the corner of Collins and Molle Streets, Hobart, offered a tremendous opportunity to create an installation that would highlight the disparity in the way materials are valued in contemporary society.

Clothing is something that many people buy on a whim, and don’t give a second thought to throw away, even if never worn. Charity donation bins are overflowing with unwanted clothing, most of which are perfectly wearable. So much so that charitable organizations regularly dump clothing in landfills, some of which is unopened, unsorted bags of donations. The simple fact is, there is way more clothing being discarded than there are people buying it. Even if it was all given away, there would still be a glut. The new market simply outweighs the second-hand market.

A considerable amount of clothing now is made from cotton, which uses an incredible amount of water to produce. An average T-shirt uses up about 4000 litres of water! Yet many of us wouldn’t think twice about throwing away a T-shirt. Not only is it a waste of resources, cotton buried in landfill will emit methane, the worst of all the green house gases, while it decomposes. Same goes for leather, linen, denim, hemp, or any other material used to make clothing that is derived from a living plant or animal.

The bricks, timber, glass and tile, that makes up a building is far more likely to be reused after a building is demolished; though an incredible amount still goes to landfill. Building materials are perceived to be more valuable than clothing, though this may not actually be the case. It is more a matter of what we assign value to. Ironically, the same protestors who may well chain themselves to demolition machinery to prevent a building being toppled, may over their lifetimes throw away tonnes of usable clothing.

http://onoproject.blogspot.com.au