I am sitting in a wireless cafe/bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, listening to a live band in the background play Klezmer. On every side of me the couches are populated with other women and men similarly fixated on their laptops. Sharing the space of being connected alone together. This country, this city, seems to be [...]

Sitting still is not something I am particularly good at. Two days ago I flew from Melbourne to New York and as usual I packed reading material and my laptop in my hand luggage. As usual I read none of it and nor did I work on the talk I have to give in a [...]

A couple of years back, Inger Mewburn and I did a project called Parametric Flesh. I always felt that this project had more to come and have had some ideas about how to work back into the original material. Today, I took one of the 3D images from the poster we submitted to the Beijing [...]

I had a dream the other night that the sphincter was the primordial muscle of the body, a muscular version of the trilobite. In my dream there was literally a sphincter inching its way around in the primordial slime – without a body. It was one of the dreams, that I often get just before [...]

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 [...]