wet nellie redux
It is my conviction that all of us who ever saw the 1977 James Bond film “The spy who loved me” were fascinated by “Wet Nellie,” Bond’s (Roger…
Tag: aesthetics
Miss Tampon Liberty
In the 1980s, when menstruation was generally considered taboo, artist Jay Critchley made art out of discarded plastic tampon applicators washed up and collected on local beaches. With…
Call for Posts: Imaging Nature
“The Blue Marble,” by NASA/Apollo 17 Crew. Public domain. Modified by Colin Hoag. Environmental humanists and environmental scientists labor over images—their production, their disseminati…
The Nature of the Copy
From the dead center of an all-white eye, a lone sapling rose two feet tall. Cyclical ridges and valleys, etched in bioplastic by an unseen watchmaker, encircled the…
Exploring multiplicity: Photographing and blogging as method
Partial truths: Blogging as research method – What do our methods actually do if they cannot depict reality as it is? This is not a new question in…
Consider the Vulture: An Ethical Approach to Roadkill
By Jonathan L. Clark Roadkill is disgusting. Many people just want it removed from the roads as quickly as possible, and they don’t care where it goes. In…
Urban noise pollution is worst in poor and minority neighborhoods and segregated cities
Neighborhoods with median annual incomes below US$25,000 were nearly 2 decibels louder than neighborhoods with incomes above $100,000 per year. And nationwide, communities with 75 percent black reside…
How subversive artists made thrift shopping cool
Over the past 100 years, visual artists probably deserve the most credit for thrift shopping’s place in the cultural milieu.
For a true war on waste, the fashion industry must spend more on research
These are admirable initiatives, but they only reduce wastage or delay garments from ending up in landfill. They do not address the fact that the scale of fast…
CFP: Muddied Waters: Decomposing the Anthropocene
For its seventh issue, Pivot is calling for papers that not only critically address the Anthropocene as our current geological epoch but, in doing so, attend to pertinent questions concerning…
the congo dandies
Description by RT Documentaries: ““La Sape” is a unique movement based in Congo that unites fashion-conscious men who are ready to splurge money they don’t really have…
Pristine paradise to rubbish dump: the same Pacific island, 23 years apart
Remember, this is not waste that was dumped directly by human hands. It was washed here on ocean currents, meaning that this is not just about one beach…
Reorganized Organ: youth mentorship project
Are you an artist, musician, hacker, tinkerer, or generally a curious person, between 18 and 24 years?
Sonic Breakdown, Extinction and Memory
by Lina Dib Originally published in continent 6(1) CC BY 2.0 DOWNLOAD PDF (https://soundcloud.com/continent/lina-dib-sonic-breakdown-extinction-and-memory) This soundtrack features sounds of environme…
Audiovisual research practice in the global era
Time has shortened, space has shrunk, social relations have stretched and information keeps coming as intensive flows. This article explores the role audiovisual media has in reshaping time…
CFP: Technical Landscapes: Aesthetics and the Environment in the History of Science and Art
The conference will address ‘technical lands’, sites where global knowledge practices and aesthetic categories have converged to literally transform the physical geography of the land. Harvard, April…
Drawing the Invisible: An interview with the illustrator for the Radiation Monitoring Project
Communicating invisible threats is an area of interest in discard studies because it requires distilling and articulating the ideas that matter most in our concepts of contamination and…
CFP: Living and Dying with “Waste Infrastructure”: Affect and Practicalities (AAA)
This panel takes seriously the way of living or dying near the waste infrastructure, showing explicitly ethnographic inquiries of despair, anxiety, hope, and sense of purity, safety, and…
Article Alert! Redefining pollution and action: The matter of plastics
From the specific case of marine plastics, Liboiron’s paper offers a more general point that those of us who study discards need to remember to take seriously: How…
Article Alert! Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime
“”During the first hour spent in houses with suspected indoor air-quality issues, I would slowly develop an ache in the back of my eyes, which would with time…
Designing for the Future at Giant Mine
How do you communicate permanent pollution and toxicity to future generations? We held workshops with community members in Yellowknife and Dettah to make models about they would communicate…
minecraft photo realism
Look at what you can make out of ‘Minecraft.’ Just look at it. Neither the idea nor the mods necessary are by me—I just went some…
打酱油 | Digital folklore & Tumblr as a research tool
What the notebook adds to this strategy of alliance with the fetishism of commodities, however, is that the very instrument of research is a fetish. In English we…
Ethnographic writing, poetics, and sensory sensemaking
“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all” ~ Oscar Wilde Recently I came to realise…