"Trash people"--an installation of waste by HA Schult

1000 Trash People in front of the Cologne Cathedral 2006

The Trash People are life-size representations of people created from waste material.

HA Schult, the famous action artist, first exhibited them in Germany in 1996. The figures caused such a positive response that he decided to take them on tour : La Grande Arche de la Défense in Paris and Moscow’s Red Square in 1999, the Great Wall of China in 2001, the Giza Pyramids in 2002, Switzerland’s Matterhorn in 2003.

click to to view this scene interactively (VR)

The e-waste man mountain

A three-tonne humanoid figure made out of electronic waste is being unveiled on London’s South Bank.

Components
include: (1) PC screens; (2) printers; (3) industrial lights; (4)
satellite dishes; (5) computer mice; (6) toasters; (7) vacuum cleaners;
(8) heaters; (9) washing machines; (10) microwaves

The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) has built the sculpture, which weighs three tonnes and stands seven metres tall.

It is made up of the average quantity of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) an individual disposes of in a lifetime, including five fridges, 12 kettles and 35 mobile phones. It is being displayed outside City Hall on London’s South Bank for 28 days before touring other parts of the country, including the Eden Project in Cornwall.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4490211.stm

Electronic Waste

Guiyu is the largest electronic waste (e-waste) site on earth, and was first documented fully in December 2001 by the Basel Action Network in their report and documentary film entitled Exporting Harm . The health and environmental issues exposed by this report and subsequent scientific studies have greatly concerned international organisations such as the Basel Action Network and later Greenpeace and the United Nations Environment Programme and the Basel Convention.

A great many of the primitive recycling operations in Guiyu are toxic and dangerous to workers' health. These include operations by the many thousands of workers who cook circuit boards to remove chips and solders, burn wires and other plastics to liberate metals such as copper, use highly corrosive and dangerous acid baths along the riverbanks to extract gold from the microchips, and sweep printer toner out of cartridges. Children are exposed to the dioxin-laden ash. The soil has been saturated with lead, chromium, tin, and other heavy metals. The water is undrinkable and must be trucked in from villages farther out. Lead levels in the river sediment are double European safety levels, according to the Basel Action Network. [3] Piles of ash and plastic waste sit on the ground beside rice paddies and dikes holding in the Lianjiang river.

Noxious chemicals and metals, such as lead, are released when the used electronics are dunked into pits of acid and heated over coal-fueled grills. Researchers at the Hong Kong Baptist University previously demonstrated in March that the soil at these recycling centers possessed the highest concentrations of dioxin and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE), a commonly used flame retardant linked to abnormal thyroid metabolism and brain development. Another study showed that workers' blood levels at the sites contained levels of heavy PBDE-BDE–209 50 to 200 times higher than the norm.

These results are "not surprising," said Oladele Ogunseitan, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who added: "The significance of the paper is to provide us with the first estimate of what [levels] to expect. As a next step, what needs to be done is as an epidemiological study looking for actual symptoms, but I imagine that this is not a trivial thing to do."

"I've always advocated that the U.S. must now take very seriously the Basel Convention that prohibits the shipment of hazardous wastes to other countries. We are, in principle, a country that will do this kind of thing on purpose. But by our inaction on international laws that protect vulnerable populations all over the world, we are essentially saying that it's OK," he explained, stating that the U.S. in particular bears much of the blame since it exports approximately 50-80% of its e-waste to China.

In 2007, conditions in Guiyu have changed little despite the efforts of the central government to crack down and enforce the long-standing e-waste import ban.[citation needed] Visitors to the city still experience headaches and strange metallic tastes in the mouth. Recent studies have revealed some of the highest levels of dioxin ever recorded.

source from guiyu wikispace & http://www.treehugger.com/


A Documentary About Electronic Waste Dumping


if you want to check more about this, you can come to this guy's website http://michaelzhao.net/ . There is a new 20 mins documentary finished in Nov 2007.

Running the Numbers

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007

Chris Jordan Creates Beauty from E-Waste

Digital artist Chris Jordan knows how to turn e-trash into photographic treasure. His large-scale images of massive amounts of statistically-inspired refuse make it all too clear just how big a problem consumer waste is. His work, which features objects from Barbies and plastic bags to e-waste and shipping containers, brings to light a tough dichotomy, presenting our gluttonous existence as consumers in a beautiful medium.

In his most recent exhibition, Running the Numbers, Jordan looks at contemporary American culture through “the austere lens of statistics.” Each image notes a staggering statistic, and portrays a large quantity of something (i.e. 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day). The image makes the statistic real, almost impressionistic in style, as it appears simple or monotone from afar but detailed up close (see the zoomed images of batteries and cell phones below). “The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming,” he says.

Cell Phones- Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.




Energizer- Depicts 170,000 disposable Energizer batteries, equal to fifteen minutes of Energizer battery production.

Behind Consumption and Consumerism

Anup Shah, Behind Consumption and Consumerism, GlobalIssues.org, Last updated: Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Fast facts - consumption statistics

Here's some fast facts on consumption you can bounce off folks to at least get them thinking.

* Half the world lives on less than two dollars a day - source: GlobalWatch.

* 12 percent of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending, but a third of humanity that lives in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent. WorldWatch Institute

* In 1950, the global population was 2.6 billion people. We had 53 million cars- which works out to be one car for every 50 persons. Today, there are 6 billion people and 500 million cars-more than one car for every dozen inhabitants. Sierra Club (lots of fascinating facts on that page)

* If the Chinese consume resources in 2031 at a level that Americans do now, grain consumption per person there would climb from around 600 pounds today to around 2000 pounds needed to sustain a typical western diet. This would equate to 1,352 million tons of grain, equal to two thirds of all the grain harvested in the world in 2004. OneWorld

* In 1950, Americans consumed 144 pounds of meat and poultry per person on average. In 2007, that's projected to shoot up to 222 pounds. Factory Farming Campaign.

* Global oil production is currently about 81 million barrels a day and is predicted to fall to 39 million barrels a day by 2030 due to diminishing resources (see Peak oil). Source: Energy Watch Group via Guardian

* In 2003, gasoline consumption per capita in North America was 1,593.1 litres per person, wheras in developing countries it was 59.2 litres per person. World Resources Institute.

* Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in November of 1958 were at 313.34 parts per million. In November of 2007, levels were at 382.35 parts per million, an increase of over 20%. Carbonify.com

* Industrialized nations, representing only 20% of the world's population, consume 87 percent of the world’s printing and writing papers and global production in the pulp, paper and publishing sector is expected to increase by 77% from 1995 to 2020. The pulp and paper industry is the single largest consumer of water used in industrial activities in OECD countries and is the third greatest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, after the chemical and steel industries. Co-op America

* The average American buys 53 times as many products as someone in China and one American's consumption of resources is equal valent to that of 35 Indians. Over a lifetime, the typical American will create 13 times as much environmental damage as the average Brazilian. Sierra Club via CNN

* South Australia is the driest state in the driest continent in the world, yet our water consumption is 445 litres per day per person (2001/2002) according to Environment SA. China's per capita consumption in the same year was 219 litres according to China.org.cn

* The world's annual consumption of plastic materials has increased from around 5 million tonnes in the 1950s to nearly 100 million tonnes today. WasteOnline

* The USA's electricity consumption per capita is 12,343.098 kWh per year and 71.4 % of that electricity is generated via fossil fuel. Australia's consumption is 10,252.432 kWh per capita, with 90.8 % fossil fuel dependent. German consumption is 6,366.428 kWh per capita with only 61.8 % of that fossil fuel generation dependent. NationMaster

* Between 2000 and 2005 around 10 million acres of forests were lost per year in South America, which incorporates the might Amazon forest. The land is cleared primarily for cattle ranches and soybean plantations. Only 20 - 25% of Brazilian soybeans are used domestically; most is exported overseas for use in food, textiles and increasingly - cattle feed. Choices Magazine and Monga Bay

* The food we eat now typically travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles from farm to our dinner plate. The distance had increased by up to 25 percent between 1980 and 2001. Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University

animation experiment

In this experimental video, i try to use different kinds of production as the elements to depict the style of Ink and wash painting. I also use th composition of ink and wash painting.

video experimental

13 second video about "illusion".