I was playing with some of the connectors I have bought to construct my ‘breath dress’ with late last night and, as you do, I stuck them up my nose. They looked quite funny – like two breathing tusks sticking out of my nostrils. Then I thought that maybe they might be some kind of [...]
As part of the Biospatial Workshop this semester, I have been constructing a ‘biotent’ to enable us to conduct messy biological projects and experiments inside the office building environment of the Design Institute. Funnily enough, I think the tent itself, which is connected to the power and channels air, through the ceiling, appears like an [...]
I have been developing on the breath as waste idea that I touched on a few months back. See here. I found a resuscitation mask that had a unidirectional valve set-up for isolating the in and out breaths so that it might be possible to wear a breath collecting apparatus and breathe normally through nose [...]
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 [...]