speaking of trash

so, back fro california. there's a lot to be said, as always. i'll try to be making short updates every day compiling some of the stuff i've been working at.

to preface things:

you should all should watch this movie... i saw a couple years ago and, along with darwin's nightmare (which has a lot to do with trevor paglen's blank spots), made me want to be a documentary filmmaker.

check out the the isle of flowers

it's only 12 minutes, and a really really amazing film.

anyway

NB: i'm very tempted to try to 'understand' the complex systems of trash flotsam/jetsam, recycling science/providures, same with landfills, but i realize that my main concern should be representation, not actually creating my own sort of enlightened understanding of these processes (at least scientifically, looking for the their 'true' form)

that is, as an interpreter, i can't expect to create my own 'map' of the garbage gyre, or of another spots of trash, mostly because i don't have the resources. i guess that's what film school is for.

one of the reasons why i think this film is so helpful is that it is an amazing representation of the relationship between humans and trash. also, watching it after having read marx gives another important level to it. that is, understanding the consequences between exchange value and use value.

i wonder if marx ever talks about garbage.... garbage is the underbelly, or perhaps, the dark side of the society of the spectacle (thinking of debord here). i know marx talks of the 'ghost' of labor value. we can look at an object and realize that it on an ontological level it contains the energy and power of some human being, somewhere. but i'll admit my knowledge on marx is limited, so feel free to call me out here.

this could definitely go into nick's area of research. spam, of the internet, is an interesting combination between spectacle and trash. its hope is to gain our attention, to call out to us, to say 'look at me, follow me!', but by virtue of that quality it turns into trash (nick you really should read that book on the development of the commodity in victorian england if you haven't already, it's where most of this is coming from).

back to problems with GIS...

i planned on trying to use GIS as a way to examine trash, but i'm getting wary of it. reading jameson's article on cognitive mapping, it seems that he values aesthetics over information. that is, he says that art should teach us, but it's still aesthetics. my concern with GIS is that it might be too statistical for what i'm looking at here. and also, really, i haven't found any GIS maps of trash, but that might be saying the same thing: we don't really know how to turn trash into numbers, or numbers that make us money. trash only turns into exchange value for a select group of people.

the isle of flowers turns up that dichotomy even more. if we're looking for affect, statistics will only get us so far. and for maps, at some level, i think aesthetics come first. in a 'postmodern map', we need to rely on a certain amount of unrealiability, of infallibility.

here's where you guys come in. i want to compare the non-space of the gyre to one of two other (places).

basically, i can see trash collecting in one of these two other spaces: on seashores, and in landfills.

seashores are appealing because they, opposite of the gyre, are the definite marker of a 'space. nothing makes a darker line on a map than the area between land and ocean. also, trash/flotsam makes it way either into the gyre for eternity, or back onto land (or finds its way out of gyres, and back onto land.)

but landfills are fascinating also, and one in particular: the fresh kills landfill.

it's no longer a landfill, but for fifty years it resided on staten island as not only one of the largest landfills in the world, but the largest structure in the world. its total volume was greater than the wall of china. visible from land, space, everywhere. medical waste (hypodermic needles) littered miles of jersey coastline in the late 90's.

and now: it's going to become a park. completely covered up, three times the size of central park. as in, it's going to disappear. even more crazy is that vast majority of the WTC debris is held there, including any stray human remains that weren't picked up.

discuss. this is me asking to you all how i should refine a comparison into a question of representation.

and speaking of navigation