 Warmth, Giant Black Toobs
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January 23, 2008
More than a billion tons of trash are dumped into the ocean every year. Oceanographers have found a swirling miasma of consumer plastics plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic toys the size of Texas in the pacific ocean[1]. Plankton, fish, birds, and marine mammals all ingest these plastics (and the chemicals they contain and leach), which in turn we ingest. Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with biochemistry, uncovering how plastics not only effect planetary health but are also linked to cancer, diabetes, and endocrine malfunctions. Like Andy Warhol said, we are indeed (and literally) all becoming plastic. In Warmth, Giant Black Toobs, I use solar power and ambient breezes to give life to the ever-present black plastic garbage bag. Polypropylene garbage bags, 50 feet tall by 30 inches in diameter, are inflated with air by allowing the wind to fill them or by running with them. One end is staked to the ground; the other end is free. The sun does the rest. Employing a similar principle to that of hot air balloons, the sun heats the air inside the toobs, and since hot air is less dense then cold air, the toobs become buoyant. Solar-produced buoyancy, breezes, and internal convection work to transform this symbol of the (American) cycle of consumption and waste into seemingly sentient creatures, live plastic hybrids whose choreography brings to mind the very sea creatures our epoch's mass of waste effects. This video documents Warmth, Giant Black Toobs at Volunteer Park in Seattle, Washington on August 17, 2007. [1] Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we? Susan Casey, Feb 20, 2007, Best Life Magazine
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