As a part of my current artist residency in the Biospatial Workshop at RMIT University, which involves a seminar called Contaminated Life, I have been thinking a lot about the material and metaphor of ‘contamination’. In order for something to become contaminated it must first be pure and contained. Contamination implies the entry of an [...]
In the Contaminated Life seminar on Thursday we were talking about making manuals for the designs that the students have been working on. One of the students, Adriana did some great work thinking about how ordinary household objects could be repurposed with entirely different functionality once they had come to the end of their original [...]
In the Contaminated Life seminar today, I gave a presentation about about my recent work/conceptual development and how it relates to the Contaminated Life theme/project. In the discussion that ensued, Pia pointed out that the ideas/artifacts that I have been exploring are somewhat paradoxical. For example, the fact that I talk about wanting to critique [...]
Last week I went to a feedback session for the fashion students doing the Contaminated Life seminar. One of the students was doing work extracting the ‘functional’ aspects of garments into a modular system of prosthetics. I have been thinking about this in relation to what I would like to do with the urine recycling [...]
Being the kind of person who likes to learn by doing and being in the process of thinking about transforming waste, I decided to do some experiments with piss. Firstly, I wanted to test out the P-Mate’s that Pia Ednie-Brown, the Director of the Contaminated Life project, so kindly gave me for my birthday. (See [...]
It has been raining all this week in Melbourne. I have still been collecting the water from my shower but I haven’t wanted to drown the plants, or waste it where its not needed. So not quite knowing what to do with it, I have been storing the water in my laundry tub. I am [...]
On Wednesday I went on a tour of the CERES water and waste management recycling systems with one of the students from Contaminated Life, Stephen Mushin. He is very excited about the potential of enacting a transformative feedback loop between human fecal waste and food – using composted poo to grow vegetables which you can [...]
While I was preparing for the Somatechnics Conference I began to diagram some of the material-conceptual relationships that were key to my presentation. The diagrams that I drew were circular – processes of transformation that returned upon themselves. In the moment of drawing, I was struck by their resemblance to the archetypal figure of Ouroboros [...]
Portable water recycling system and carbon credit saving device. Again, some thoughts inspired by Contaminated Life and meditations on material-economic transformations enacted through bodies. I’m not sure why I did the tits all saggy on my model… Perhaps because I envisage that the suit is most likely to be employed by women living in desertified [...]
I have been sporadically attending the Contaminated Life seminar at RMIT in preparation for work to be done as part of my residency next semester. This, in combination with work done around ideas of waste and contamination last year at SymbioticA, have got me thinking a great deal about waste and how I manage it [...]