Brainstorm  11-27-07

I'm interested in:  Landfills.  These things seem gross and diseased as they are filled with our waste, yet I find I'm drawn to them.  It has something to do with the man-made hill that they end up becoming.  The terraced look they have as they stack up to the sky.  Generally they are huge mountains, just teeming with our trash.  I would like to do a core sample, or a cut-away diagram that shows the strata of the landfill like a geological cross-section.  I might build one and cut it up with a saw and display it.  I like the finished look, once the top has been capped off with dirt, so it really resembles a hill.  I don't like the looks of the ones where you can see all the trash.  When I did an internet image search all I found were images of bull-dozers pushing the garbage, no decent zoomed out photos that show the landscape.  The ones I've seen that come to mind were outside of Chicago on I-55, and another outside of Paducah, KY on I-24.  Also one outside of Nashville, TN.  These mounds juxtaposed with their settings were sublime and beautiful.  I guess it's on further inspection that they become gross.  According to one website about a landfill in northern Indiana, most of it's trash comes from other states, esp Chicago.  Way to pass on you troubles!  I bet they pay a decent amount for this.  How do you figure out what to charge to bury your trash in another place where you don't have to deal with it?  I bet it's by the ton or something.  These trash hills have liners that collect garbage water, and treat it in nearby silos.  There's also reservoirs to collect methane gas that's produced by these things.  This gas can actually be used for industrial purposes.  This actually makes sense, why not find means to create power from our waste.  Energy is in such demand and trash is in such large supply, why not make to bio fuels from it.  I read about a plant in Carthage MO that made oil from bio-waste such as chicken scraps from Tyson.  It also could make oil from other items, I think they just needed to have carbon in them.  Amazingly, heat and pressure can make this oil.  However, I think it takes so much energy to make this oil that it's not an efficient method.  Recycling seems like the logical thing to do.  Why the hell do people not recycle, there will be a recycling bin next to a waste bin and people will still throw something recyclable into the waste bin!  A friend of mine told me that recycle also has it's downfalls in that it requires so much energy to melt down these things and reuse them.  Still though it saves on having to mine and process these things in the first place.  Colleen told me someone is actually mining landfills for scrap metal, etc that has value.  I once heard that there is over a billion dollars worth of aluminum cans currently in landfills.  Australia once had a ban on the exportation of scrap metal from the continent because ore and metal was in high demand, and they didn't know where more on the continent was.  Then a guy in the northwestern portion found a huge patch that was like 10 miles square.  Now Australia is a leading exporter of ore. The website from Indiana also said that all landfills leak to some extent.  This means groundwater contamination!  The very thing that is so important to our lives-water, and we're profiting on our own poisoning.  Sounds a lot like fast food. 

Material is of interest to me in making my art.  I choose a material because of the content that may inherently be attached to it.  Like my investigation in the papermaking process using dryer lint.  Most expensive paper is make from cotton, not trees, so it seemed to make sense to use dryer lint because it is largely comprised of cotton fibers from our clothes.  The incidental hairs also helped make the material stronger.  Each part needed each other to make the whole possible.

I like the idea of using natural systems in my art, as well as randomness.  This, I think, is my way of removing myself from my premeditated marks.  I don't know if I don't trust myself, or if it's because something natural seems purer and untainted by human manipulation.  However, the situation is generally very influenced by my actions and it's just randomness that acts as the cohesive varnish that I try to tie things together with.  I set up situations and let natural systems or randomness finish the job.  To me it seems that chance happens when I let nature take over, thus the universe relies on free will.  It doesn't seem logical that a creator, ie God, would decide each decision in our lives.  I think God would leave the decision making up to us, but all along these reactions are meant to affect us in our attainment of being actualized beings.  These are hurdles in our lives that are there to make us better people.  I think God created a system that would perpetuate itself until living, breathing things developed.  Maybe we are made in God's image, but that image could be vaguely similar.  God might have two arms and two legs, a head, a torso or even reproductive organs, maybe they don't look exactly like ours, but they are still there.  Maybe God is just pure energy, just a set of impulses capable of thought, yet also the building blocks of everything.  Like string theory, where on the subatomic level every form of matter is comprised of rings of wavy energy that vibrate in different ways creating each element.