black and white. this was the feeling that I had when I first saw this 4T of etrash parked on hangar.
during the following week I’ve been scavenging for raw materials over this trash. the white feeling comes with the joy of having all of this etrash to get amazing parts following by a black cloud of pollution, toner powder, acid from batteries, and all sort of hazardous material all mixed and without an easy way to isolate them from being absolved from my lungs and skin. today the human body have 300X times more chemical compounds than 100 years ago. for example cadmium is widely used in industrial processes, as an anticorrosive agent, as a stabilizer in PVC products, as a colour pigment, in the fabrication of nickel-cadmium batteries also phosphate fertilizers show a big cadmium load. this human-inbody-pollution comes from the paint that we use on our houses, the cleaning products, the VOCs that most of our teckno-gadgets free every 24h of every 365 days of the year and are also present in our food.. basically in the cities we are surrounded of potential health problems and we are sharing these with all the animals and plants that also live in this planet.. and these 4T are a mirror of this. to put this things worst, nothing is designed for disassembling.. you must have 3432 different kinds of tools to take apart everything and most of it is glued forever. the artist sue lea that is having a residence at hangar is the responsible of this landscape. one day of etrash from barcelona city in front of us.
4 tones of toxic waste.. tears fall from my eyes.. this is a very dark thing to reflect on. and the nonsense part of all this is the great amount of money that the consumers paid for this trash, the great amount of expensive materials like gold, silver, aluminium, coper, plastic and totally functional motors, pumps, powers supplies, screens, rare magnets buff you name it and its all there on this 4T.
but having access to scavenging this trash had a price:) sue lea asked me to develop some futuristically plants :) on work is about UKI a post modernist fragmented replicant that lives in a world of etrashscape where love and sex are not connected. so this was the exercise: make a farm for UKI word. so I’ve proposed to sue lea 2 plants: one poisonous and one aphrodisiac :D
apart from the science fiction exercise I was able to test some technical solutions that I hope to apply on re:farm. I now have a big box full of steeper motors, magnets, wires, resistors, condensators, etc.
these have been some amazing days, taking all the guts from Ibooks, powerbooks, pc towers (great power sources 220AC to 12V, 5V, 3.3V DC) hard disks, cd/dvd/flopy readers (powerfull magnets, bright round blades, steeper motors and precision mechanics) printers (motors, wells, …) more time I had more stuff I’ve found..
It was a pleasure working with sue lea, she is good mood in person :) Tiago (from altlablx.org) was with us, nuno guerra, andreas puk, loida gil, nia silva and natércia silva all gave a great help.
one thing that was boring me a lot was the fact that I was spending too much time in front of the computer instead of being on the farm :) so I’ve built a low-budget-way to visualize the data without having to look at the computer screen. the above picture is from the “
