Rubbish

Currently reading: Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl, 2012, eflux Journal, Sternberg Press. Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle.

Part 1/5

The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.

http://www.e-flux.com/books/the-wretched-of-the-screen/

pdf: http://thecomposingrooms.com/research/…/e-flux_Hito%20Steyerl_15.pdf

In studying (image) representation of rubbish and the exchange and discarding of images, the politics of image and representation are quite fundamental. Two of her essays in this book are particularly relevant: In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective because of her references to montage and more centrally In Defense of the Poor Image. A couple of notes also come from A Thing Like You and Meand Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation.

Preface: “The digital image is not as ephemeral as one might think, because just as a photograph is lodged in paper, the digital image is lodged in a circulatory system of desire and exchange, which itself relies on a very specific economic regime.” (p.5)

Franco “Bifo” Berardi in the Introduction (p.9) marks 1977 as the “watershed point of de-evolution or de-civilization”. He also talks about the “material legacy of industrialization, sacrificed to religious dogma or god called ‘the markets’”. He pinpoints the second decade of twenty-first century as when “post-bourgeios dilapidation took the final form of a financial black hole.”

“The seductive force of simulation transformed physical forms into vanishing images, submitted visual art to viral spreading, and subjected language to the fake regime of advertising. […] History has been replaced by the endless flowing recombinations of fragmentary images” (p.10).

“It was the 1990s, decade of crazy acceleration when the black hole began to form, that Net culture and recombinant imagination emerged from the ashes of visual art reduced to imaginary spam, and intermingled with media activism. […] Hito Steyerl’s essays in this book are a sort of reconnaissance mission, a cartography in the making of the wasteland of the frozen imagination, but also a cartography of the emerging new sensibility.” (p.11)

continued…

Currently watching: Garbage Warrior (2007), 86 mins, dir Oliver Hodge.

“What do beer cans, car tires and water bottles have in common? Not much unless you’re renegade architect Michael Reynolds, in which case they are tools of choice for producing thermal mass and energy-independent housing. For 30 years New Mexico-based Reynolds and his green disciples have devoted their time to advancing the art of “Earthship Biotecture” by building self-sufficient, off-the-grid communities where design and function converge in eco-harmony.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNYFlcV9R1w

Simon Woolham at Paper Gallery put me onto this documentary after our rubbish conversation in Stockholm. With the current ‘eco chic’ ‘upcycling’ trends doing the rounds on social media, my timelines are often filled with designs from the old student classics-suddenly-cool-again pallets made into tables and old tyres made into planters to more crafty and aestheticised designs such as coat hooks made from old cutlery. Whilst the former is very function orientated, in that it’s using cheap/free and abundant materials to hand that have ideal properties for their reuse, the latter take on a more superficial upcycling design aesthetic. These things look cool in spotlit studios against a white backdrop but place them in an ordinary home full of average consumer items they might look a bit silly with a few bent forks sticking out of the wall.

But the reduce, reuse and recycle ethos has to start somewhere, and a few bent forks might lead to completely reconsidering the consumer tat next to it and the whole nature of the identical chocolate box house it all resides in.

The documentary subject Mike Reynolds didn’t exactly take this path of eco-living enlightenment as he started from the architecture itself. He comments that the traditional practice of architecture barely takes into account the environment or the people that inhabit it. Looking for self-sustainable means of living, he has devised a couple of techniques to build housing termed biotecture (n. 1. the profession of designing buildings and environments with consideration for their sustainability. 2. A combination of biology and architecture.):

Can bricks: beer cans wired together like a brick six-pack and compacted with dirt.

Tyre bricks: bigger versions of the can bricks with compacted dirt in each tyre.

These 2 units can be used to build walls or even domes and can be covered over or left to reveal the recycled materials. Reynolds talks about his revelation of how walls using these materials are excellent at retaining heat (thermal mass) so that even in winter additionally heating sources are not required.

Glass and plastic bottle windows: a la Stig of the Dump, bottle are placed on their sides so the light filters through the base of the bottle. Reynolds comments the coloured bottles look like gems.

Being aware of natural light has enabled Reynolds to build houses with South facing pane windows harnessing the maximum amount of light and enough to see by in daylight hours throughout the house as well as grow food all year round.

Other key elements to his designs include roof design and guttering to collect enough water to self-water the greenhouse and be purified for consumption, solar panels for sustainable power.

The decades of work and refining his designs with teams of enthusiastic people around him to help has resulted in ideal self-sustaining homes, cheap to make, and completely off-grid. The documentary shows him try and navigate the US legal system to enable this kind house building for everyone who wants it. It fails due to massive bureaucracy of the system.

The film follows him and a team to India’s Andaman Islands after a devastating tsunami. The local infrastructure and housing is destroyed and the local population has been reduced to a fraction. Reynolds and his team build self-sustaining buildings with the local community, showing them how to do it themselves after they have gone back home. Reynolds is obviously delighted to have been able to make a difference here, and comments on the contrast between how easy it is to implement new designs on a community scale here, whereas in a supposedly first world country it has proved an arduous and unfruitful journey.

http://www.garbagewarrior.com/