Landscapes of Waste

This project is the final product of my research for the Digital Humanities graduate certificate elective course, “Landscapes of Waste: Theories and Representations of the Discarded in Contemporary Urban Culture” taught by Professor Maite Zubiaurre. Postmodern discourse (Mira Engler “Contemplating Waste: Theories and Constructs”; Gay Hawkins “Down the Drain: Shit and the Politics of Disturbance”) relating to the Western world’s obsession with hygiene, cleanliness and the obfuscation of over-consumption and excessive waste expose early sanitation processes of modernity dating back the 18th century. The project takes a multimedia approach to highlighting the current situation of landfills in the urban space. By utilizing the content management system entitled Scalar, this project will draw comparisons and highlight differences between the developing world and Western practices relating to landfills, specifically the shift from dystopia to utopia. Scalar is an open source authoring and publishing platform designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, digital-born scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing.

This project contrasts the documentaries and films Ilha das flores (1980), Estamira (2004), Waste Land (2010), and the Landfill Harmonic (2015), with the documentaries Garbage Mountain Megastructures by National Geographic (2006) and The Fresh Kills Story: From World’s Largest Garbage Dump to a World-Class Park (2012), as well as documentation from visits to a Los Angeles area landfill in order to trace practices in the emergent and Western worlds and discuss their implications.

Scalar

2013