Liliana Porter “man with axe”
sculptural installation called “man with an axe” in which a man in a suit and hat smashes up what appears to be the wreckage of the past, chopping it into bits…
“Edel was interested in ways of bringing back manufacturing jobs to the city,” explains Melanie Hoekstra, director of operations at The Plant. The building is uniquely suited to food production; it contains food-grade materials (these allow for legal and safe food preparation) because of its meatpacking history. Instead of combining farming with other types of manufacturing, The Plant is sticking entirely to food—and lots of it.
I think we posted something about this project last year, emphasizing aspects that are recurring Unconsumption topics: adaptive reuse — the conversion of existing buildings to new uses — and urban farming. (Though I’m not finding an earlier post about it in the Unconsumption archive. Ah, thanks, Tumblr search.) Anyway, it’s great to see that the project’s progressing nicely.
“What we’re actually seeing in the ocean is this kind of chowder of plastic – these tiny particles that are the size of plankton. It’s plastic that has been weathered and broken down by the elements into these little bits and it’s getting into the food chain.”
Edward Humes met with scientists who study the 5 massive gyres of trash particles swirling around in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Created by the convergence of ocean currents and wind, the gyres contain masses of litter that aren’t entirely visible by the human eye. (via nprfreshair)
In earlier Unconsumption posts, we’ve called attention to ongoing issues of ocean trash and gyres; several of those posts can be found here.
(via unconsumption)
The story behind two mysterious signs in the Smithsonian’s collection complicates the provenance of the invention.
(via OPEN: The History of Neon Signs - Hal Wallace - Technology - The Atlantic)
Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.
The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.
Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
Read more. [Image: Phillip Toledano]
QR codes used to encourage citizens to adopt neighborhood trees
The District of Columbia’s Department of Transportation has recently launched a new scheme as part of its Canopy Keepers project, which enables residents to easily adopt a newly-planted tree using QR codes. READ MORE…
I’ve long been a fan of artist Jean Shin; she’s turned discarded objects into really cool artwork. (We’ve featured some of her work on the Unconsumption Tumblr.) Here, I’m standing in front of one of her broken umbrella sculptures, in a private collection in Houston. (Taken with Instagram at Houston, Texas)