e-waste expose

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4586903n

a great 60 Minutes report on ewaste, it's about 10 minutes in length.

questions and answers

questions from Katie Webster of Amelia's Magazine, a culture magazine in the UK, for a feature on my works.


- can you tell us a little about your previous bodies of work post training?
eg. outline some of your more successful exhibitions (in your eyes), ones that shaped your progression to the themes which you are currently pursuing
(perhaps A Nightmare on Grand St) to focus more on shelter, continental drift, entrance, drift and the throne...

I've been working on the current body of work for the last four years. Just before I started my current work, I had a show in Brooklyn in the Spring of 2004 that I called Glitch. The work from that show was the culmination of the ideas I had been pursuing for the previous few years starting in graduate school. I had felt a shift coming for awhile. My frustration about world events and the culture I live in was too great to ignore. I felt that my work was too passive in it's cultural criticism, mainly because I was probably the only person who knew that my paintings were critical. They were very idiosyncratic, abstract paintings. I was painting with a set of symbols/motifs that only I was really able to understand. There wasn't any representational symbolism in those paintings except for the fact that they were vaguely landscape oriented. The paintings consisted of these landscapes, populated by undulating, grid based patterning, which was loaded symbol for me. My anxiety about not really being able to communicate what I wanted to say was extreme. I started a series of drawings that began exploring what I would add to this closed system. The fact that they were closed systems was part of the point, so it was a struggle to find the kind of symbol that I could live with. First of all, I started making waterscapes, which had oil drums peeking above the surface amongst the undulating patterns. I felt that these could lead to something, so I continued along these lines. Already the paintings were touching on issues of ecology, and I was using them to talk about ideological conflict. In the course of doing internet image searches for "wastelands" and similar key words, I began to find images of huge piles of computers and televisions scattered in places around the world. This electronic scrap was exported by the U.S. and other technological nations under the auspices of a recycling project, but really it is just a cheap way of dealing with toxic waste. These piles became a powerful symbol for me because by using them I could comment on a culture of consumerism and waste, and through this lens also continue working with issues surrounding hi-tech culture and mythology.
For the Nightmare on Grand St. event in 2005, I collected 28 or 29 computer monitors and televisions off of the streets in my neighborhood in Brooklyn over the course of three months. They were all out on the street for the garbage pick-up, and all had about an 85-90% chance of ending up in China, or Africa, or anywhere else that would take them for recycling. China alone illegally imports somewhere around 18,000 shipping containers full of U.S. e-waste per year. Their government has made it illegal, but scrap merchants easily import it without problems. Also, the U.S. is the only technological country not to sign the Basil Treaty, which basically states that technological nations will deal with their own e-waste, and not export it to any other country. However, even in countries that have signed this treaty, individual companies within the country often find ways of exporting it.
I then opened all of these computers and televisions up, broke out their CRT tubes leaving only the glass on the front and invited friends and other artists paint and etch images onto the glass. Then I made some rudimentary furniture out of stuff left on the streets for garbage pickup, and piled these computers in a large pile on the sidewalk in front of the gallery I was working with on Grand St. in my neighborhood. All of the computers were lit from the inside by candles like jack'o lanterns. There are a few images of individual lanterns on the press release that you can see here: http://www.jonelliottonline.com/Jon_Elliott_newpage_53_Nightmare_Press_Release.htm I have repeated that project on a smaller scale for group shows in Atlanta and Los Angeles as well.

- which do you feel are your most groundbreaking, or successful works on your site? could you explain a bit about them.

"Plague of Excess" is probably the most ground breaking piece, in that it is the first large painting I made within the current body of work. It was started at the end of 2004, and extended deeply into 2005. It made me realize how powerful the subject matter could be, esp. when expressed on a large scale. It also set the tone for the painting "Run Off," which was made dirctly after, and many of the paintings to follow.

- what made you concerned with issues to do with technological ideology and mythology?

Because I think their examination reveals a tremendous amount about our cultural currents as a whole, how we view the rest of the world, and the environment we live in. Besides that, I have always been into science fiction that deals with technology, which is modern myth making.

- what has made you so intrigued by computers and tv's in the content of your work?

Among many reasons, because they are objects that are very powerful in our culture. I'm interested in them as symbols, and how the symbol changes when they are depicted as piles of garbage.

- what messages are you wishing to convey?

Complicated question, because I'm hoping to convey more then just messages with these paintings. What I try to do is to inform these paintings with enough subject matter that easy access, ready for print messages are difficult to pin down, and hopefully whatever I am learning or teaching myself will be conveyed. There are messages, but I don't want to pin them down because there are so many that mentioning a few of the more obvious ones would tend to depreciate the more subtle ones.

- what response or action are you hoping to achieve?

I hope people look at themselves and their own culture through a new lens.

- are you involved in any organisations, protests or groups?

I'm not really an activist, though I have attempted to become involved in certain groups. I've also attempted to start certain programs. For instance I attempted to start a "program" where people would buy and then donate important documentary dvds to local video stores, under the agreement that they are rented out for free. There are some things that I think people need to see, and maybe free rentals would help encourage their viewing. That didn't really get off the ground, but it's still an idea out there. It's one of those projects I would love to see someone else do. However, much like a good journalist, I think painting helps me maintain the appropriate removal from my subject matter to be able to see things more clearly, and make work that is skeptical and philosophical. I do get involved on some level though. I think the "Nightmare on Grand St." event is a good example of a project that had the feel of an activist project, but through the lens of an art action.

- where do you see your work developing from your current body.- are you working on anything at the moment?- what do you see future work concerning?

New developments include the transformation of the piles of garbage into structures that were obviously constructed by humans for some sort of shelter. There are many reasons for this current transformation, and I'm only beginning to understand them. It's a process of learning, I don't always immediately understand the reasons I make certain images, though I understand enough to know whether it's worthy of my time. That's the project I'm working on right now, and part that body of work will be on display in London during the Zoo Art Fair in Oct. I see my future work concerning a similar satellite of ideas as my current work, but I don't know. I never really know when the next major development is going to happen, I just trip over it in the course of moving through ideas.

---------addendum----------------
-Can you explain more about what you mean by technological mythology?

I have some concrete notions about what it means, and many fuzzy impressions. It is really a topic so vast that to fully explain what I mean by it, it would take writing you a book. This morning I did an internet search on "technological mythology" and one of the first hits was an article, very didactic and alarmist, in the extremist style of much media culture writing. It was written by someone named Jesse Hirsh, I wouldn't recommend reading it, it isn't well written. It is an example of one persons definition of technological mythology, and his attempt to expose the myths surrounding the internet. The title of the essay is "The Mythology of Technology: The Internet as Utopia." The internet is a powerful cultural force, and has been for a long time, but it is only one example of a mythologized technology. Here are a few quotes from the essay: (if you want, I can send you the link the the entire essay)
"The most dominant myth of our time is the Internet. The mythological meaning of the Internet: 'Utopia'. It has become the technological metaphor large enough to absorb all the hopes, dreams, and desires of a civilization. Millions have rushed on-line in search of a meaning, a harmonious narrative that describes change."
and another:
"The Internet by definition, does not exist. It is an abstraction that nobody has seen, smelled, or touched. It is a myth used to shift our belief systems and dramatically alter our behaviour. It transforms our linguistic framework by changing the context in which language interacts with mind. It is a redefinition of literacy as the linguistic system itself becomes simultaneously individual and collective."
and:
"Through the virtualization of our culture, the medium of mythology reconstructs reality to manufacture consent. Growth and development are guided and directed by the few at the expense of the many. The technological mythology is reality in the virtual world, and our consuming desires drive us to live virtually perfect. In the process we have negated our sovereignty and secured the Platonic chains around our neck as we stare at the shadows on the cave wall."
I wouldn't say that the internet is a myth, I would say that there is an abundance of powerful myths about the internet, and there have been for many years, predating the popular use of the internet. And the internet is really just one of many sources of contemporary mythology. Some pop culture stories involving technology have been told so many times, by different people, that in my opinion they have entered the realm of myth. In addition, there is a very religious element to technology, there are various cults and sects of people who embrace technology in a way that christians embrace their savior, for instance. A pop culture reference would be the Matrix trilogy, which updates the christian mythology with a new christ figure Neo, for example. An old, equally well known example is the movie Tron, which has many of the classic elements of technological myth, including the idea that human consciousness is a pattern that can be quantified and reanimated within a supercomputer, that even the body can be reduced to a binary code, etc. It is striking how similar some of these ideas are to ideas about 'the soul' in other mythologies, but "heaven" is replaced by a supercomputer. There are several other themes that Tron hits on, many of which were previously discussed in the book Neuromancer by William Gibson, one of the more famous "cyber punk" novelists. Neuromancer has been so influential to contemporary visions of virtual reality, internet, etc.,that in a way, it is a modern technological mythic story. It is so culturally influential in ways that even people who aren't online, or who don't like, or might even hate "science fiction" have been influenced by the ideas in that story. I don't recommend reading it, it's not very well written. But there are many real life examples of people who actually do really believe this stuff. It always amazes me what people believe in. Some technological mythologies get tangled with UFO cults, the examples are many. Almost all of the new religions embrace technology, from Scientology to the Heavens Gate, to the Raelians (sp?). However, I'm more interested in how the popular media portrays technology, commercials, movies, novels, electronic music, television shows, etc. I guess what I'm saying is I'm more interested in how visions of the power of technology interacts with consumer culture, and how these mythologies (either utopian or dystopian) fill deep psychological needs, and often abstract reality in ways that are not always socially positive, and in some cases are destructive, but are all seemingly geared in some veiled, and some obvious ways, to getting you to buy a new laptop. Well, there are many reasons for myth, and not all of them are sinister or commercial, they are also stories that stimulate the imagination and are genuinely entertaining and relevant. But, I'm a skeptic, and all that really means is that I always look for the other side, and feel the need to question assumptions and beliefs. Like I said in the last group of questions, making paintings of images of piles of garbaged computers and televisions, with flickering images of consumer culture on the screens, gave me a symbol through which I could begin to question the mythologies surrounding technology and consumer culture in general.

article from greenpeace.org on ewaste

excerpted from:http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/e-waste-toxic-not-in-our-backyard210208

Published on Greenpeace.org

I have saved this article for my own research purposes.

The amount of old electronics, or e-waste, such as computers, phones and TVs being discarded every year is growing rapidly. In many countries it's the fastest growing type of waste as cheap prices mean replacing electronics is cheaper than fixing them, while low price often means low quality and a very short life spans.As electronics increasingly become part of the throw away culture in many developed countries, amounts of e-waste have dramatically increased while solutions have often lagged far behind. Even in the European Union (EU) that has tighter regulation 75 percent of e-waste is unaccounted for. Of the estimated 8.7 million tonnes of e-waste created annually in the EU a massive 6.6 million tonnes of e-waste is not recycled.In the US there is very little regulation of e-waste. Less than 20 percent of US e-waste is recovered for recycling. Worrying the recycling percentages for PCs (10 percent) and TVs (14 percent) are even lower. The imminent switch to digital TVs in the US and elsewhere will lead to a massive increase in the amount of redundant analogue TVs.Even from the 20 percent of e-waste collected in the US much is exported because the US is one of the few countries where it's still legal to export collected e-waste to Asia and Africa.
The huge amount of e-waste not recycled can be accounted for by:- Storage: Often old electronics are stored in people's houses. This only serves to delay the day they are finally discarded and reduces the chances they could be effectively reused. - Landfill/Incineration: When mixed with domestic waste electronics will most likely end up in a landfill or incinerated. Both methods allow toxic chemicals to pollute the environment. - Reuse and Export: Old computers and phones are often exported to developing countries for reuse or recycling. The vast majority are crudely recycled in e-waste scrap yards causing widespread pollution.
Digital Divide Countries like India and China have long been a destination for e-waste dumping by unscrupulous traders looking to make a quick profit on e-waste from the US and Europe. Now the amounts of domestic e-waste generated by these countries is growing fast. In India only one percent of e-waste is collected for authorised recycling.Across Asia and Africa informal recycling yards have sprung up where low paid migrant workers use primitive methods to extract valuable metals. This informal recycling creates massive environmental pollution and damages the health of workers and residents in the area.Even well intentioned shipments of computers for reuse are being abused. In Ghana many traders report that to get a shipping container with a few working computers they must accept broken junk like old screens in the same container from exporters in developed countries. The broken junk and eventually even the working computers inevitably ends up dumped in Ghana where there is no infrastructure to safely recycle toxic e-waste.
SolutionsOne clear solution is for the major electronics companies to eliminate the worst toxic chemicals from their products and improve their recycling programs. Having generated demand for the latest new mobile phone or sleek laptop and made vast profits from sales of electronics it should not be a problem the companies are allowed to ignore.
In 2006 more than one billion mobile phones were shipped worldwide. However, Nokia (the market leader) recycles just 2 percent of the phones it sells.The major computer makers do little better, with currently an average recycling rate of just 9 percent. That means the major companies don't recycle over 90 percent of their old products.To address the rising tide of e-waste all manufactures must offer free and convenient recycling of their products to all their customers. Where companies are unwilling to do this tough legislation is need to ensure electronics are safely recycled. Japan has effective recycling legislation and Sony reports that it collects 53 percent of it's old products in Japan. That's five times better than the global average for major PC makers and shows that solutions are already available.
While most companies accept responsibility for recycling their own products, and are improving their recycling programs for consumers, several TV companies are dragging their feet on recycling with the majority offering no recycling for old TVs in many countries. Of the TV companies, Philips stands out by publicly stating that recycling is the responsibility for the customer and government and consumers should pay for recycling, not the product makers. Behind the scenes Philips lobbies to avert legislation to make companies more responsible for recycling their own products.Basically Philips is helping ensure the status quo remains, that has lead to such a large e-waste problem. We have delivered this report direct to Phillips and other companies to show how they need to stop hiding from the problem of e-waste.
E-waste: The good, the bad and the uglySince August 2006 we have been ranking the major electronics companies' efforts phase out toxic chemicals and improve recycling programs - both vital steps to tackle e-waste. Many companies have made big strides to improve their products and recycling schemes since the introduction of the Guide. But no company has so far succeeded in offering an entire range of products free of the worst toxic chemicals or a comprehensive, free, global takeback scheme to ensure responsible recycling.

Computer servers 'as bad' for climate as SUVs

Computer servers 'as bad' for climate as SUVs
14:29 03 December 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Catherine Brahic

Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry, warns a new report.
Global Action Plan, a UK-based environmental organisation, publishes a report today drawing attention to the carbon footprint of the IT industry in the UK.
"Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."
The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.
The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.
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edited

ageing electronics

From issue 2632 of New Scientist magazine, 02 December 2007, page 27

found on: technology.newscientist.com

Ageing may be as important to electronics as it is to good wine. A plastic transistor doubles its performance if simply left to sit at room temperature for a week.
Cheap to mould, pentacene transistors are a promising candidate for organic electronics. However, when they are being built, molecules can misalign to form defects, which trap electrons and slow the transistors down.
Now Wolfgang Kalb's team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has found that if a newly made pentacene transistor is left to sit in a vacuum, the defects disappear naturally (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.1457).
Self-healing typically requires heat, but in pentacene the "jostling" between molecules that occurs at room temperature is enough to realign the molecules and remove the defects.

Synthetic Ocean

From "Moby Duck, Or the Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood," by Donovan Hohn from Harper's Magazine, January 2007.

The California Coastal Commission, an independent, quasi-judicial state agency, estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of visible plastic floating in every square mile of the ocean, never mind the invisible pieces Charlie Moore has gone trawling for. Based on the samples he collected, Morre calculates that in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre there are now six pounds of plastic for every one pound of zooplankton. Zooplankton such as salps, a kind of chordate jellyfish that feed by pumping seawater through their gelatinous bodies and straining out the nutrients, ingest bits of plastic far too small to catch an albatross's eye. But the journey of the toys won't end there, in the watery belly of a salp. Long after my own organic chemistry has fertilized leaves of grass, the pulverized, photodegraded remains of that hollow duck of mine will, chemically speaking, live on, traveling through the food chain, scattering toxins in their wake.
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Another incongruity: in 1878, nine years after the invention of celluloid, a sales brochure promoted it as the salvation of the world. "As petroleum came to the relief of the whale," the copy ran, so "has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer." A hundred years later, in the public mind, plastic had gone from miracle substance to toxic blight. In 1968, at the dawn of the modern environmental movement, the editor of Modern Plastics argued that his industry had been unfairly vilified. Plastic was not the primary cause of environmental destruction, he wrote, only its most visible symptom. The real problem was "our civilization, our exploding population, our life-style, our technology." That 1878 sales brochure and that 1968 editorial were both partly, paradoxically, right. Petroleum did save the whale, plastics did save the elephant, not to mention the forest. Modern medicine would not exist without them. Besides, they consume fewer resources to manufacture and transport then most alternative materials do. Even environmentalists have more important things to worry about now. In the information age, plastics have won. With the wave of a magical iPod and a purified swig from a Nalgene jar, we have banished all thoughts of drift nets and six pack rings, and what lingering anxieties remain we leave at the curbside with the recycling.
Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas may very well run out in the not too distant future. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals require fossil fuels to produce and release greenhouse gases when they break down. What's most nefarious about plastic, however, is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something-anything-could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting. The flotsam Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers find is not only incongruous, it's uncanny, in the Freudian sense-a repressed fact breaking forth with the shock of strangeness into our conscious minds. As he, Charlie Moore, and other oceanographers can tell you, the ocean does not so easily forget. Chemically, it remembers. An environmental geochemist at the University of Tokyo has shown that on the open sea polyethylene acts as a toxin sponge, attracting and concentrating free floating non-water-soluble chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, that are safe only as long as they remain inert. .....
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A PVC duck in the bathtub may well be harmless to your child, but no one yet knows how post-consumer plastics that escape the landfill are altering the chemistry of the environment. The experiment, which began a century or so ago, is ongoing. In the meantime, Ebbesmeyer worries that plastic could do to our civilization what lead did to the Romans. He thinks the garbage patch may betoken nothing less then "the end of the ocean." The seas have become synthetic. The planet is sick. It can no longer recycle its ingredients, or purge itself of pollutants.
Some of the archaeologists in our beachcombing expedition have studied the midden heaps of shells that prehistoric seafarers left around the Pacific Rim. Garbage often outlasts monuments, and if 10,000 years from now archaeologists come looking for us, they will find a trail of plastic clues. It will be easy to date us by our artifacts. At the rate we're burning and extruding fossil fuels, the age of petrochemical plastics promises to be relatively short.

From "Time Bandits"

An exchange between "Evil" and "Henchman" from the movie "Time Bandits:"

Evil: When I have The Map, I will be free. And the world will be different, because I'll have understanding.

Henchman: Understanding of what, Master?

Evil: Digital Watches. And soon I shall have understanding of video cassette recorders and car telephones. And when I have understanding of them, I will have understanding of computers. And when I have understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme Being! God isn't interested in technology. He knows nothing of the potential of the microchip or the Silicon Revolution. Look how he spends his time; 43 species of parrots! Nipples for men!

Henchman: Slugs

Evil: Slugs! He created slugs! They can't hear, they can't speak, they can't operate machinery! I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic?! If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess around with butterflies and daffodils! I would have started with lasers! 8 a.m.! Day One!

Henchman: I just can't wait for a new technological dawn.

Great Paragraph, From On Garbage, John Scanlan c.2005

Wilst the technological appropriation of nature is 'not simply a continuation of Platonic metaphysics', to quote Robert Pippin, it does result from the adaptation of knowledge, and its apparent perfectibility through a succession of separations (or 'clean breaks') that attempt to optimize knowledge. Certainly, it is a response to historical contingencies - as Robert Pippin says, 'crises, inventions, growing paradoxes of the old paradigms, and the gradual "delegitimation" of the old science'. But it is also the separation and withdrawal that derives from the metaphysical understanding of the world (in the sense that metaphysics is always a separation and withdrawal), and is not simply co-extensive with something like capitalist produciton (as Pippin seems to suggest). What we say here, then, is that every act of differentiation - every 'clean break' with the past, creates garbage; results in leftovers. This is not to say that ways and means are not found to re-use this garbage (as I have been arguing, this is what always happens), because nothing ever simply vanishes. Things - objects and ideas, for example - may fall out of use, be declared derelict and demolished, but what results from this just constitues the material for new forms. In the facile 'garbage in, garbage out' vision of instrumentality we fail to see this (instead we only see that garbage 'disappears'), and the irony here could not be greater because of the extra garbage that the personal computer produces. Even here, however, we can detect an attempt to cosmetically alter the fact. Thus, where the Macintosh computer - which provided the basic model of the working environment for most subsequent computers - began with the 'trashcan' as the destination for unwanted files, in the Microsoft version ('Windows' which was charged with simply stealing the Macintosh idea) this is subtly altered to become a 'recycle bin' (complete with the environmentally frendly recycling symbol). While the trash from these virtual bins appears to be liberated to create space on the computer disk that can be re-used, as Slavoj Zizek noted, in reality it is practically impossible to erase and so constitutes 'the ultimate horror of the digital universe', which is that while things may be cancelled, or deleted, 'everything remains forever inscribed'. The possibility of 'undeleting' files tells us that they don't really disappear, and so a 'simple PC contains a kind of "undead" spectral domain of deleted texts which nevertheless continue to lead a shadowy existence "between the two deaths," officially deleted but still there, waiting to be recovered'.

In our ceaseless refinement, as we shall see, we yet manage to restore the dead in other forms as well.