Movies and Flowers!

Visualization

When we watched The Incident in class, I was very disturbed and it produced a visceral reaction within me. My palms started sweating and I was frozen watching the film. I hated the overgrown nails and protruding belly button of the older people stuck on the road and the missing teeth and visible ribs of the elderly cop on the stairs. It was incredibly depressing and disgusting, and when I thought about why, my mind came to the word accumulation. The food accumulates, the waste accumulates, and the people’s ages and actions accumulate. It is the limited space that makes the consequences of accumulation so visible. 

I began thinking about how much trash I produce in a day and it made me sick. Working with Feral Atlas and its environmentally conscious mission to inform and educate while being interactive made me even more upset. The Incident was screened around Halloween so I had just bought a bunch of candy to stuff my face with, if I’m being honest. I started collecting trash that I felt I could work with but I didn’t know exactly what to do with it yet, I was thinking maybe a collage in the beginning. I asked some of my friends for their candy wrappers or chip bags and they gave me a weird look while handing it over to me. I had never focused so much on the amount of waste around me because I would always discard something and not think about it again.

When I gathered enough trash I cut them into little pieces but then I saw my molecular modeling kit on my desk. The models help in producing three-dimensional views of organic molecules and illustrate how different orientations reveal different properties of the molecule. I always liked feeling the model pieces fitting together in my hands and knowing I could rotate and manipulate it. I built a cyclohexane model, which is a molecule made of an inner ring of 6 (black) carbon atoms, with 12 (white) hydrogen atoms surrounding the ring (2 for each carbon) and I started sticking my trash on it. I then began to poke holes in some of the wrappers and put them on the bonds between the atoms to make the two materials interact more. I chose to make a cyclical, or circular, molecule because of the loop-like nature of the incidents in the film, and the 6 carbon atoms represented the 6 incidents mentioned in the film. The hydrogen molecules also represent the confrontation between two people at the end of the incidents where the older person warns the younger not to cause another incident, but the younger person causes one anyway. The atoms and trash are all bonded together just like the incidents in the film and the people involved are stuck together too. 

Cyclohexane and other ring-like molecules are organically occurring, or can be found in nature. These molecules of life represent life as a scientific process while The Incident addresses life and time in an emotional but also critical perspective, and it shows the natural process of aging in a grotesque way. My sculpture unites the two views by adorning the organic molecule with trash that my friends and I accumulated. Ironically, I only used 11 of the 15 pieces of trash I collected because the molecule got crowded so fast and I didn’t realize the amount of trash I had. The Incident and this visualization have made me more conscious of the trash I produce on a daily basis, and I have begun to try to reduce the amounts I make in a week, a month, and a year or more. I also told my friends to try to reduce their waste when I was asking them for their trash because awareness helps fight ignorance. I am so proud of how it turned out and I can say I made a sculpture out of trash.