Dross; on the onset of a post-production era
Lydia Kallipoliti, Princeton University

01 >> dross _ dross matter / dross culture

The word dross refers to matter that is foreign, worn out and impure; it is a phantom material condition, that is unnoticeable to such an extent that it almost does not exist in our perception. Dross is worthless; it is an incidental, displaced material [figure 1], a by-product of chemical reactions that serves no purpose. Nevertheless, when it appears, a necessity is created for its removal. In time and through the use and misuse of language, the word has ended up in signifying waste, impurity [ ] or any incongruous accumulation of disparate elements, pieces and material fragments. However the etymological origin [ ] of the word refers to a residual substance that emerges in transitional material stages, such as the process of melting a metal or the process of sedimentation of a liquid. Therefore, dross is unrelated to the natural decay of a material and the passage of time. It is by definition “the scum, recrement, or extraneous matter thrown off from metals in the process of melting” [ ] or “an alloy incidentally formed in the zinc-bath [ ], by the action of the zinc on the iron pot and iron articles dipped. (Wahl Galvanopl. Manip. 1884)” [ ].Then, dross as a material condition comes to signify more than an entropic landscape or a disparate accumulation of worthless materials. It depicts material derailment and the production of displaced matter. It reminds us, that pure operations of making, seem to belong to the sphere of impossibility.

The purpose of analyzing the ingredients and the properties of dross substance lies beneath the fascination of metamorphic materials. Dross may be an alchemical fiction and a phantom material condition, but at the same time it is a product, or better stated a by-product, of social reality, paraphrasing Donna Haraway, who denotes that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” [ ]. The intrinsic properties of dross substance are analyzed to serve as a medium for the comprehension of a cultural phenomenon of incidentally displaced matter that is automatically rendered meaningless and serves no purpose whatsoever. Based on the perception of material impurity, this paper will attempt to encompass the generative potential of obsolete objects and spaces, or in other words waste material that is displaced culturally or functionally from either its previous or its original identity.

The cultural fabric for this paper revolves around the material ramifications of unprecedented technological evolutions in communications that have irreversibly shifted our production and consumption modes during the past two decades [figure 2]. The technological evolutions in computer software and hardware that have been producing novel tools have been in parallel producing immense quantities of ‘techno-junk’, tons of purposeless and indestructible matter, almost impossible to dispose of. The past decade though, concerns related to waste streams have slightly shifted in their orientation. Waste is no longer an issue that relates solely to quantity. It now also relates to the intricacy of the waste matter and its material composition. With the advent of highly advanced manufacturing methods and processes, many products that are displaced from their original roles and reach quickly and unexpectedly the end of their useful lives, are highly complex in form and material composition, containing in parallel high amounts of embodied energy [figure 3]. Electronic waste, known as e-waste, is the largest growing industry of waste in a global scale. The rates of computer obsolescence are so extreme that “in the year of 2005, one computer will become obsolete for every new one put on the market” [ ] [figure 4]. Alongside the numbers, a personal computer “contains over 1,000 different substances, many of which are toxic, and creates serious pollution upon disposal” [ ].

Side by side to the waste derivative from the electronics industry, a mundane reality of big defunct objects – building displaced parts- is overwhelming the contemporary city. Techno-junk is an emerging city-born condition; Defunct oil tanks, air-conditioning tubes, advertising billboards, containers and other apparatuses articulate a new urban language that violates the building envelope or attaches itself to it as an outgrowth. If one identifies in the city fabric, a stratum of buildings that can be easily mapped due to their longevity, equivalently he could identify a stratum of mechanical appendages that cannot easily be mapped due to their ‘ephemerality’. The significantly different lifetime of the two strata is the cause for an erosion of the outer building shell that cannot adapt to the change, taking place in it or around it. The unmappable urban condition of this “floating matter” in the city has been yet unexplored by contemporary architecture. The necessity of such a discourse is not only driven by the formulation of an ecological awareness, but also by the need to manipulate this kind of raw material. Potentially, it could lead to an alternate practice of recycling, based on questions of matter, rather than on questions of representation.

The question arising is to what extent this phenomenon affects architectural design and in what manner. Obsolete and ‘nondisposable matter’ is influential in diverse scales of reference such as the scale of an object –defunct computers-, this of a room –oil tanks, air conditioning tubes, containers etc.- and that of a building –partially abandoned buildings, ‘brownfields’ etc. The content of this paper engages ‘obsolete matter’ in various scales of reference, or ‘techno-excrements’ as an emerging city-born condition, derivative of the urban system’s internal erosion.

02 >> Re-genesis of diverse matter _ post-praxis design strategies

“… We think of Picasso’s bicycle seat (Bull’s Head) of 1944:

You remember that bull’s head I exhibited recently? Out of handle bars and the bicycle seat I made a bull’s head, which everybody recognized as a bull’s head. Thus a metamorphosis was completed; and now I would like to see another metamorphosis take place in the opposite direction. Suppose my bull’s head is thrown on the scrap heap. Perhaps some day a fellow will come along and say: ‘Why there’s something that would come in handy for the handle bars of my bicycle…’ and so a double metamorphosis would have been achieved.” [ ]

By engaging a strategy of irony as a legitimate method of approaching phenomena, Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter assert that there is no social or constructed reality “that we have to accept in toto” [ ], but a composite present realm consisted of fragments. A discourse of collaging fragments is ironic, because it resists utopia. It recognizes a “loss” in objects, buildings or urban domains that have misplaced their previous fixed identity and encompasses this condition as a generative potential. The significance of this citation, resides in its unique interpretation of meaning. Here, meaning is not an inscribed, static quality, embedded in objects. Conversely, it is a tacit, malleable status perpetually redefined, as the object is appropriated and reused, as it undergoes a metamorphosis. In this sense, the tactics of reuse is not solely an environmental strategy directed to the utopian idea of the world’s salvation. When dealing with meaning, reuse “fuels a reality of change, motion, action” [ ].

Then, the argument of reuse is not bonded merely to ethical and practical concerns. It is about manipulating the material aspect of an unprecedented flow in the urban fabric. Along the same lines of thought, the condition of flow and unremitting transformation is characterized by Kepes as a fundamental reorientation of the 20th century. He explains that “the dominant matrix of nineteenth-century attitudes was the use of Marx’s term ‘reification’; relationships were interpreted in terms of things, objects or commodity values. Today a reversal of this attitude has begun to appear; there is a steadily increasing movement in science and in art toward processes and systems that dematerialize the object world and discredit physical possessions. What scientists considered before as substance shaped into forms, and consequently understood as tangible objects, is now recognized as energies and their dynamic organization” [ ].

Extenuating the strategy of appropriation, reuse and transformation, dross praxis does not begin from scratch, but from the reality of an existing inoperative component; therefore, meaning is inevitably shifted. It can no longer be located in the process of representing an abstract concept, but in the act of manipulating matter and bonding new functions to objects that have lost their previous, fixed identity. Instead of a genesis of meaning, there is a regeneration of meaning and identity. A dross_ post-praxis dwells conceptually in what one could consider as the counterpart of parthenogenesis -the phenomenon of virgin birth. It emerges as a germinal creative drive, through the desire for transformation of existing information, concepts and physical entities; it engrafts a copiousness of thought or “a transformative vision” [ ], defying pure, virginal creations. If we assume that nothing emerges ‘out of zero’, a post-praxis aims to retain the energy induced in creative systems and exploiting the accumulative effect of knowledge and materiality.

Leaping to the pragmatics of the domain of material reuse, new issues have emerged in the past two decades, yet unresolved to a great extent. The case of a bottle, which would be the consumer by-product of the 70s, and that of a personal desktop are largely dissimilar as waste streams. Despite the fact that objects belong in the same category of scale, the material composition of a computer makes it recycling an excruciating and elusive task of shredding and segregating into constituent components and materials before the actual recycling process takes place. Consequently, there seems to be a necessity to use defunct circuitboards for instance, as larger ready-made complexes or components for entirely new uses. Such a practice is supported in few cases through the production of materials by recombinant methods and assemblies. Within this framework of thought, waste materials can be inserted within new materials, either as reinforcement or as ready-made components, yielding particular local behaviors relative to the performance of the new materials. In light of this technique, the notion of ‘downcycling’ becomes relevant to the next use and ceases to depend on the ‘performative’ properties of the new material. Recombinant assemblies stipulate material crossbreeding as a strategy for ‘upcycling’. Along the lines of this argument Sheila Kennedy remarks how “secondary and tertiary methods of post-industrial production produce recombinant materials: materials within materials… The most inexpensive pressboards are made from the waste scraps of the rarest woods. These claddings products confound the representational hierarchies of front, back, exterior and interior, and are equally acceptable as substrates or finish materials” [ ]. Recycled ground cover [figure 5] and Alkemi constitute such examples of ‘recombinant assembly’ materials. The former is a “loose-fill groundcover derived from 100% recycled vulcanized rubber from whole passenger and/or truck tires… held in place due to the interlocking properties of rubber” [ ]. The latter is a “solid surface material made by blending salvaged aluminum chips or other non-ferrous metal waste with a silica fiber and pigments, bonded with a polyester resin” [ ].

03 >> Historic Synthesis of material reuse _

Material reuse is certainly not a new territory of exploration. Locally found materials in nature and materials recovered from deceased animals, such as whale and mammoth bones [ ], were used directly for shelter and weaponry in prehistoric times. Up to the twentieth century, recycling was more of a technical exploitation of recourses or an incidence, rather than a cognitive strategy of material reuse. The falls of empires often succeeded recycling of the materials of buildings; this act was bonded to the disconnection of buildings from their cultural and monumental significance that were consequently used as ‘quarries’. Alongside acts of ‘quarrying’, in the construction of tombs in ancient Rome, entire objects were reused, such as pots and carafes, in a repetitive manner to form shells or vaults. A characteristic example is the “fourth century Roman tomb on the Via Apia, which was dubbed ‘pigna terra’ in honor of its dome built of clay pots… We are familiar with the dome of hollow jugs of the orthodox baptistry in Ravena which was begun in 400 BC and finished 50 years later” [ ]. In the cases of these tombs, construction was instigated by an assembly line of ready-made components, which discloses ground for a different perspective of material reuse, potentially not directly linked to technical parameters of recourse extractions.

With a massive time gap, the issue of reuse has reemerged, monumentally appealing, as an offspring of rapidly advancing industrialized processes. Mechanical reproduction was critically questioned by artists and literary critics of the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin and Fernard Leger. Marcel Dunchamp’s declaration of the urinal as a work of art, emancipated a syllogism that disconnected the reminiscence an object was carrying along with it from its materiality. The object could then be viewed as ‘raw material’ utilized for further spatial deployments. In parallel, one of the main representatives of the Dada movement, Kurt Schwitters, gathered material from the street and collaged it to make artifices in the interior of his apartment, in order to create the compelling work of the Hanover ‘Merzbau’ in Germany [ figure 6]. Schwitters’ declaration was to build out of nothing –merz-, meaning out of displaced material that experiences a loss of identity. The importance of Schwitters’ artwork extends to the techniques of deploying the material he collected. He did not simply put it together in an additive manner. Instead, he created a second smooth membrane that sealed the realm of collage. Eventually, the compositions of the prosthetic art became latent building material, where points of local interest revealed through openings called ‘grottos’. Schwitters’ wrapping of his collected waste material depicts two fundamentally different principles that constitute simultaneously bipolar and inherent drives in creative praxis. These principles are collage and molding, where the first denotes an additive logic of juxtapositions and superimpositions and the latter denotes a procedural, evolving logic of transfusion.

“By the late sixties it started becoming obvious that continual economic growth had its down side. As the booming consumer society mindlessly guzzled fossil fuels and raw materials, a counterculture arose whose participants sought a way back to their natural roots. These drop-outs from conventional society hoped to swap self-centered consumerism for an autonomous, communal lifestyle. Not surprisingly, the back-to-nature movement drew its most ardent support in the Western USA. They established whole villages of astonishing self-built structures. Inspiration for the building types and techniques appropriate to a self-supporting society came from the (not all that distant) pioneering past and from nomadic architecture” [ ] [ figure 7 ]. At that time, two parallel concerns arose. The former was related to increased urbanization rates and alarming demographic statistics, indicating massive population moves to urban centers which were already overpopulated and most of old structures were not fit for adequate living conditions. The latter concern was related to a consumer culture that was growing like a plague, leaving behind it more and more colossal amounts of physical waste and unused materials, given the fact that there were few if no strategies of reuse at that time. These two interests coalesced in a short-lived movement instigated by architects that attempted to seek solutions to the housing problem through the use of consumer waste materials.

Frederic Migayrou refers to this historic moment as a time of “simultaneous origin for urbanism and ecology” [ ]. The merging of the housing predicaments with the potential derived by recycling consumer products was functioning in accordance to laws of nature and metabolism. As natural systems recycle their wastes, the hope of recycling by-products of urban environments became prominent bringing to the foreground a naturalistic perspective, diffusing positivist connotations. Apparently frustrated with consumerism and housing issues, architects joined the two themes under an aborning umbrella of ‘artificial ecology’ and launched a new movement in the 70s of garbage reuse, often referred to as ‘garbage architecture’ [ figure 8 ]. Although, these architects through their subversive work were performing some form of social critique, it should be noted that their ideas were in accordance with the conceptual main streams under the generic prism of “an organic model of life that came to the fore. As one can see from the theoretical works of the Chicago School: The Town; A Natural Phenomenon; The Urban Phenomenon as a Way of Life; Expansion as Physical Growth, the town became a physical entity, a constantly changing organism that should be studied in vivo with the same methodology as that which dealt with the ecosystems of nature” [ ].

Guided by the belief that “one man’s pollution can be another man’s housing” [ ], “garbage architects’ began experimenting with various materials that had no essential value and were in a state of ‘oblivience’ as industrial by-products. More specifically, Witold Rybczynski in Canada experimented with sulphur and attempted to find a use for it as a building material. He recorded that “in Alberta, at the present time (1973), 9 million tons of sulphur were stockpiled … Sulphur could be considered to have virtually no value and was, in effect, an industrial waste… Sulphur also occured as sulphides and sulphates of metals and was a by-product of mining operations” [ ] [ figure 9]. At the same time, Martin Pawley headed a research program at Cornell University in collaboration with the municipality of Santiago in Chile. The research program concerned “the possible value of garbage housing in the context of the explosive urbanization of the Santiago region. This research was carried out at Cornell University in the Spring of 1973” [ ]. Their goal was to produce housing solutions with the use of extant obsolete material in the regions of Santiago, especially consumer by-products. They were thoroughly examining ways in which to create links between packaging-container industries and building industries in order to achieve what Martin Pawley has called a “parasitic housing policy” [ ]. Finally, “the two Cornell prototypes were experimental structures built using cans, bottles and corrugated cardboard… The second house, a scale model of Le Corbusier’s Maison de Weekend was designed by David Montanari and Warren Lee. It featured walls of hand-corrugated sandwich panels devised by David Ross, and vaulted roof sections using large numbers of soft drink and beer cans as voussouirs” [ ].

At the end of the decade in May 1979, “the first International Conference of Garbage Architects was held at Florida A&M University and examined ‘junk’ as a problem and a solution” [ ]. However, hints of frustration had already risen from the movement’s main advocates. Their sincere attempts to seek pragmatic solutions for the growing housing problems faced immense impediments by the building industry, which was functioning in a closed-loop of linear productivity and could not act as a receptor for by-products of other industries. On top of this impediment, with the technology available at the time, it was excruciatingly difficult to use by-products in such a manner in order to produce quality housing, fulfilling technical standards of insulation. In 1973, Martin Pawley confessed that “to serve redesigned packaging into this machine (referring to the building industry) as a low cost building material is to submit to a process of alchemy in reverse; the outcome will be costly, scarce and irrelevant… any attempt to introduce a revolutionary new strategy… must not only develop outside the present structure of the building industry, but inside the mainstream of mass consumption itself” [ ]. Seeing through the overt parameters that have instigated garbage housing to flourish under the cultural conditions of the 70s, one has to note that the ‘fuzzy logic’ of this subversive idea was accompanied by a lack of charm or appeal that would be a prerequisite to sustain the utopic discourse. ‘Garbage architects’ were guided solely by their ethos and sense of grandiose responsibility of saving the world. However, not even they themselves were intrigued by their designs; they were quite frank about it as well. So along all the practical hindrances that lead to the fall of ‘garbage housing’, the lack of appeal was also a significant side factor.

Concurrently, at the beginning of the 70s, parallel interests in the creative use of diverse used materials found a more creative expression in art, channeled through the movement of ‘Arte Povera’ in Italy. Although artists of this movement and ‘garbage architects’ shared analogous tactics of material deployment in their work, their foundational logic and core concerns were extensively dissimilar. ‘Garbage architects’ were geared by an environmental sensibility in response to distressing technical issues; on the other hand, ‘Arte Povera’ artists were seeking manners to use ‘primordial matter’ as a means of artistic expression, attempting to release themselves from the bonds of conventional representation techniques in painting, that was the dominant, if not exclusive, tradition in Italian art. As art critics note, the development of ‘Arte Povera’ in Italy, “paralleled a broader international tendency (in the United States, the trajectory was through Pop Art, to Minimalism and Conceptual Art) in which the supremacy of painting was challenged from both the theoretical side and the practical side as artists found in sculpture an extraordinarily rich field of exploration” [ ].

“The phrase arte povera first appeared in a text authored by a twenty-seven year old art critic named Germano Celant to accompany his exhibition Arte Povera e IM Spazio at Genoa’s Galleria La Bertesca in September 1967” [ ]. Celant identified the eminent cultural shift towards materiality in artistic production and gave a collective identity to 13 Italian artists who “had a diversity of exhibited work behind them, but at that moment, in the autumn of 1967, all shared a crystalline understanding of the marriage and concept of materials” [ ] [ figure 10 ]. The term ‘Arte Povera’ [Arme Kunst] is immediately translated as ‘poor art’. However, the emphasis does not reside exclusively in the use of worthless unused materials; it resides in the belief that “art could be made from anything: living things, products of the earth, and industrially produced materials, as well as immaterial substances such as moisture, sound and energy. Art could be made in any way. It could be painted, handcrafted, industrially produced, gestured, spoken, written, acted, dreamed” [ ] [ figure 11 ]. In this sense, the inherent entropy in matter is viewed as a generative force for the artists. They were urged to reveal the elemental nature of materials and release their properties through an open-ended experimentation, producing art. Art was not pre-conceptualized and consequently executed by the application of materials to already established concepts and ideas. On the contrary, these two parameters of the creative praxis were parallel investigations; “an interaction of work and material” [ ] [ figure 12 ].. Moreover, “the shift was no longer from the object to the material in the pictorial sense, as with the Informale artists, but to a ‘brutally elementary material’, a physico-chemical presence that evokes the primordial… but the most striking aspect was the experimental juxtaposition of materials to create a strange encounter between the normal and the mythical, everyday life and art… Other critics went further by interpreting the work as a rearticulation of archetypes and myths of a ‘Mediterranean civilization’ to be counterposed to the technological, rationalistic and materialistic civilization associated with the United States. Materials, in this framework, were made to carry a heavy baggage of political and ideological connotations” [ ].

“In May 1972 Celant pulled the plug: When the Munich Kunstraum organized their exhibition [Arte Povera: 13 italienische Kunstler], he requested that the title of the show should not be ‘Arte Povera’, but the names of the individual artists” [ ]. Celant was primarily responsible for the fact that the group of the thirteen Italian artists gained a collective identity. He launched ‘Arte Povera’ as a coherent cultural stasis in the production of art. His objection in 1972 to maintain this identity was also in opposition to the artists’ will, who attempted for more than a decade to grasp from the communal potency of the movement. Gradually though, the effect faded and the artists pursued individual itineraries. Whatever the case, one has to note that the movement of ‘Arte Povera’ has played a pivotal role in the production of art; a dense and compact instant in history of cultural resistance to form and generative potential of displaced matter.

Approximately twenty years later and in an entirely different arena of expertise, the group ‘Asymptote’ has created a series of indefinite digital images “I_Scapes, B_Scapes & M_Scapes” that have emerged from the digital manipulation of commercial objects designed in the computer [ figure 13 ]. Prodding into a novel realm of ‘digital reuse’, their series did not encompass the direct application of obsolete materials, but instead involved the production and the reuse of virtual images that could then be manufactured. Common everyday objects such as shoes, car parts, wheels and others were introduced in the computer and manipulated through the use of digital media. The intrinsic logic of three-dimensional software tools became in this case a medium of open-ended exploration; a medium that has yielded unexpected results in comparison to direct material manipulations. Such an exploration discloses an alternate perception of matter that emerges from the use of a newly available tool. “The I. Scapes derived from the Asymptote’s reading of the effect of the computer on culture, with particular focus on new formations of meaning and a revised understanding of what now constitutes spatiality. Asymptote’s I. Scapes are discrete architectures provoked by and extrapolated from the proliferation of digital manipulated imagery from mass culture, the media and advertising… The I.Scapes are neither appliance nor building. They are instead continuous and fluid traces of uncanny resemblances. They fetishize mutation, distortion and delirium, forming spaces fused with image. The choreographed assemblies meander through channels of possibility and familiarity, arriving by chance at unforeseen orders “ [ ].

04 >> Collage and Molding Operations _ Molding Case Studies

The ground logic for a post-praxis of reuse seems to revolve around two fundamentally different principles that constitute in parallel both bipolar and necessary drives for any creative praxis. These principles are collage and moulding; where the first denotes an additive logic of juxtapositions and superimpositions and the latter denotes a procedural, evolving logic of transfusion.

In many cases of reuse, disparate obsolete parts were added either to different contexts or to other obsolete components. This syllogism of bringing fragments together and interrogating their newly formed relationships in new assemblages constitutes a prime artistic revolution for the twentieth century. Collage embeds the notion of reuse in an elemental sense. As a line of thought, it is founded on the acknowledgment that meaning fluctuates and cannot be resolutely engrafted into the physicality of objects at a specific moment in time. In this sense, collage is a practice that “violates ‘property’ in every sense- intellectual property protected by copyright, and the properties of a given concept” [ ]. It is a kind of theft [ ]. Group Mu’ s exegesis of collage is characteristic of the embedded logic of reuse and appropriation in the practice of collage. According to them, collage is “to lift a certain number of elements from works, objects preexisting messages, and to integrate them in a new creation in order to produce an original totality, manifesting ruptures of diverse sorts… Collage leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists also of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition” [ ].

Although molding also involves the appropriation of existing objects and contexts, its case is vitally different. The obsolete matter is interrogated for its textural and formal potential and successively used either as a matrix or as material that can be plastically manipulated. Then the matrix is subjected to a process of many stages; a process that essentially feeds itself as molds and cats change roles in and out without a definitive ending. As Beatriz Colomina points out, molding “is a space to reveal its secrets, to show the unseen. This is no way a polite affair… Casting is an interrogation of space: violently pulling evidence out of it, torturing it, forcing a confession. If anything, casting approaches the supposedly benign but actually brutal techniques of medical inquiry and diagnosis, and the no less violent excavations and demolitions involved in psychoanalysis” [ ].

By putting the two principles of collage and moulding, in opposition, one can draw the following assumptions: If collage signifies the change of context, then molding signifies a material transfer; if collage’s scope is a syntax change, then molding’s scope is a substance change; if the intrinsic principle of collage is prosthesis of parts, then the intrinsic principle in molding is fusion of parts; if collage is about transformation, molding is about transmutation.

For decades now, collage, as an analytical tool and a method of irony has been dominating the conduits of imagination in the creative praxis. Recent developments though in biology and informatics depict urges for a cultural shift towards new paradigms of thought. The wonders of genetic engineering, artificial skins, reflexive membranes and biosciences portray a shift from the mechanical paradigm. Genetic processes are structurally different from their machinic counterparts. They are not only distinguished because of their soft form, but also because of their origin, their production processes and their eventual integration to the body. This ground-breaking shift from the mechanical limb to the artificial organ or skin, due to our capacity to manipulate and eventually duplicate in different terms DNA, has conceptually infused diverse domains of thought and expression, including art, informatics, computation and architecture.

The words ‘mold’, ‘plasma’ and ‘plastic’ are etymologically related to the Greek word ‘π____~π_____’, which refers to a condition of material malleability and the manipulation of substance until a shape is given. Consequently, moulding differs significantly from collage as an operation, since it speaks of material transfusion and the search of perpetual transformation of matter. Using moulding in a broader sense here, it is used to describe not only ‘molds’ used to produce inverse volumes in the conventional sculptural sense, but also to encompass a ‘plastic’ use of material. Therefore, the ‘moulding’ case studies that will be presented as follows refer to artistic and architectural endeavors where: i ] obsolete matter is used as a matrix or a ‘reproductive machine’ for numerous by-products of an inoperative component ii ] an inoperative component or part is wrapped and encased by layers of different materials, leaving its imprint only as an internal volume.

[ Matias and Mateo Pinto – Caracas ]

Matias and Mateo Pinto, two young practicing architects in Caracas Venezuela, were assigned to build the La Vega Community Center in one of the poorest neighborhood in Caracas, in the course of “an ambitious plan to improve and formalize the squatter settlements –locally known as barrios- that occupy the city’s hillsides” [ ]. Pinto’s perspective in the upgrading of the area was one of strategic alliance of the new building and its surrounding environment; an integrative approach to both the structure and the materiality of the barrios in the city’s hillsides. Their building was designed in such a manner as to open itself to existing pathways and void spaces in various levels, both through its volumetric expression and through its accessibility. A significant concomitant concern though, was to use existing used materials as parts of the exterior envelope’s structure [ figure 15 ]; “the building materials and techniques reflected the improvisational and opportunistic character of many barrios constructions… In a last minute decision by the architects, the in-situ casting utilized a textured plastic formwork from air-conditioning filters” [ ]. Although referred to as an unpunctual decision, the reuse of junk material that is floating around the hills is deeply associated with the culture of construction in the hills, where most building units are not necessarily composed of one unified material, but instead of various diverse components that are readily available and are attached to different surfaces. In this case, floating waste material becomes a mould for the production of new material and reflects the mercurial building conditions in the ‘barrios’.

[ Specht Harpman – New York ]

“Specht Harpman has developed a strategy for the mass appropriation into architecture of familiar, small-scale objects –from ice-cube trays to mineral water bottles- repetitively assembling them to create delirious, highly textured, colorful and ornamental surfaces. Specht Harpman uses the term ‘hypertexture’ to describe the visual complexity generated by panels of these objects” [ ].
Spechtman is interested in drilling a social critique on mass production culture and unveil a new approach to ornamental expression through the appropriation of packaging systems that apparently yield complexity when used as molds for repetitive tiles. In his designs, he does not seek to generate complexity through intricate thought patterns, but to find complexity in the formal presence of obsolete matter and expose it to the public. “This formal complexity of the individual containers is rationalized and subsumed through repetition into a visual field, a texture; but when viewed closely, it displays the geometric expressiveness of ornament –in this sense, created by repetitive absence, the negative impression of familiar consumer goods” [ ].

[ Lo/Tek –New York ]

In the case of the Lite-Gate project, Lo/Tek has used a plastic shipping pallet as a mold in order to create door panels. The interest in this project lies in the composition of the cast material, which fuses the liquid material of resin with electronic devices, micro-censors and neon tubes. The idea was the registration of entrance through the detection of movement by the censors and the consequent illumination of the panels. In parallel, the censors transmitted information to cameras, which recorded the people entering the apartment and projected the information in screens located in the interior of the apartment. Lo/Tek describe this project as “an illumination and surveillance device that marks the narrow corridor connecting two previously separate apartments. It recreates the experience of passing through a metal detector and acts as a luminous buffer between the outside world and the privacy of a home” [ ].

The reuse of the shipping pallet that is utilized as a reproductive matrix exceeds its conventional role in providing formal features for the panel by-product. Instead the electronics are embedded in the mold and the final panel product turns out to be a compact solid panel with wired cast substance. In this sense, new modes of conceiving casting are disclosed; approaches that are unrelated to ‘tiling’ and decoration, but focus on the material composition of the mold yielding an enhanced performance.

[ Rachel Whiteread – London ]

Whiteread’ s case is a particular one, since she casts obsolete spaces; entire parts of buildings illuminating the internal structure of their interior [ figure 18 ]. More specifically, she selects buildings that are meant to be demolished and are already abandoned and she casts their internal space as a trace, a memory. Whiteread’ s work is one of revelation; by turning the void space into a solid block, she exposes that which is not seen, that which does not exist in our perception as a coherent entity. “Her casts stays content with the negative, the inversion, the conundrum” [ ]. Her materials have shifted significantly in time and in each given site, largely dependent on the texture that the mold has to bear as reminiscence of the obliterated space. By infusing different materials into large spaces in volume, her work moves ahead of the reproduction of a part used for tiling and stays aside from any interpretation relevant to decorative concerns. Instead her inverted cast spaces are giving volume and material to residual space, turning memory into a ‘solid block’.

[ Antony Gormley ]

Antony Gormley has created an art series of diverse objects, each encased in a singular material, entitled ‘Natural Selection’. The material Gormley selected was lead, which as a malleable metal would allow him to mold around his selected objects while retaining an approximation of their formal features in size and volume. Through this process of wrapping, the different objects were disconnected from their utilitarian identities and became part of a unified series, gaining new connections between them through their shear size and volume [ figure 19 ]. The series was one of evolution of form created by the most simple objects of everyday use; “pea, pencil, carrot, plumb bob, goose egg, grenade, lemon, light bulb, pear, paintbrush, parsnip, pestle, marrow, bottle, coconut, ball of string, melon and ball. It was important to the artist that each real object should be inside its lead casings” [ ], as he mentioned that “‘the surface carries the memory of a moment in the history of the object” [ ].

Some time after Gormley has submitted his art work for display, an interesting incidence occurred. “Soon after the sculpture was acquired, problems were noticed on the lead casings containing the banana, courgette, lemon, pea, parsnip and melon. The contents were decomposing and leaking, causing white disfiguring marks on the outside of the casings” [ ]. Those casings containing natural elements were distinguished by the others because they were contaminated from the inside as the objects decayed. The museum that was hosting the art work at that time had to go through a process of cleansing the selection for reasons of hygiene, especially since they have already started to exude displeasing odors. When they opened the casings, they found to their surprise a new undefined material that has emerged from the interaction of the lead with the natural elements; an actual dross material.

On this issue, the curators note: “There was sufficient solder between the four pieces of lead that made up the casing sections to saw through with a small piercing saw without touching the lead either side. To our surprise, a very thick white and brown crusty layer filled the void between the coconut shell and the inside of the shell casing. It looked like plaster but was identified as a lead corrosion product. Lead is susceptible to change when in contact with mild acidic by-products from the decomposing coconut formed a basic lead carbonate. The flattened fibers on the coconut husk had encrusted particles of lead carbonate and in places there was black mould” [ ].

05 >> Composite Grafting

The combination of actual obsolete with their molded by-products marks a novel territory for material reuse that I shall call here, composite grafting. The term ‘by-product’ does not connote obsolete objects of the utilitarian waste stream; instead it adverts new ‘artificial’ objects that can be formed by using an obsolete component as a reproductive matrix, or a mold. By using found objects as molds and casting on them different materials than the ones they were made of, the occurring by-products will retain partially characteristics of the original object, but will have different properties, creating assembly lines of materials with local behaviors and properties according to the material synthesis of the by-products. Composite materials make a useful analogy to the strategy of a composite graft; they are composed of elements that work together to produce material properties that are different to the properties of those elements on their own. On the basis of this assumption that relates to the behavior of material synthesis in a micro-level, it is advocated that larger obsolete ready-made components combined with their by-products will yield similar results. Grafting the actual obsolete component that has been rendered displaced and needs to be reused, with its own by-products, one can actually begin to develop new material properties and spatial products that exceed the realm of signification. Moreover, one can probe into the process of casting and imagine ways of reproduction that transgress the equal repetition of by-products. Casting is a process of many stages and these stages can be planned in such a way in order to yield variations or a pool of diverse components, instead of the exclusive return of the original object. By binding these objects in elusive yet promising combinations, one can imagine an emergent materiality with local behaviors and variable performances. Overwhelmed with the amounts of waste streams in all possible scales of reference, we either use objects as they are and put them together in a repetitive manner or liquefy them so as not to deal with their materiality at all. The fact that we need to reuse the actual obsolete matter that is nondisposable is apparent and indisputable. However, perhaps it is essential to bind this matter in more mystical assemblies in order to reuse it also to a cultural effect. This reused matter necessitates compulsively a new identity and a new relationship with its environment, other than the label ‘reused matter’ and the concomitant positivist assumptions. Along these lines, lies the discourse of dross; dross is neither concerned with the salvation of the planet, nor with environmental policies. It is rather yearning for the fluctuation of meaning and identity of displaced matter.