Gyre: Creating Art From a Plastic Ocean
This film follows a team travelling to Alaska to examine how much of our garbage has ended up in the region’s gyre—a rotating ocean current.
This film follows a team travelling to Alaska to examine how much of our garbage has ended up in the region’s gyre—a rotating ocean current.
Waste is never completely or permanently “out of sight.” Once discarded, it undergoes transformations, often reappearing elsewhere in new forms. In this volume of RCC Perspectives, scholars from different disciplines—from history and art history, urban geography, environmental studies, and anthropology—investigate the traces waste leaves behind in the course of its travels.
Artwork and film projects have the potential to expose trash in a variety of forms and help us visualize, acknowledge, and critique larger systems in which plastic waste circulates and operates.
In this commentary, Stefan Helmreich considers how Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave, has recently been leveraged into commentaries upon the Anthropocene, and how the image has been adapted to speak to the contemporary human-generated global oceanic crisis.