By The Pound, 2019

By the Pound utilizes open source sketchbook software to overlay images of plastic waste on to video of a jellyfish habitat, while a counter ticks in real time the amount of plastic waste in pounds that has been dumped into the ocean. Every time a piece of garbage is selected from a repository at random and dropped into the video, one ton of plastic waste has entered the oceans.

The counter, based on data from The Ocean Conservancy and visualized by The World Counts, estimates about 10% of the 100 million tons of plastic waste generated per year ends up in our oceans. While this statistic is horrifying in itself, I wanted to contextualize it with the short time of the exhibition’s running, so that viewers are directly confronted with their impact on our oceans even in such a short time. In approximately 24 hours, over 50 million pounds of plastic waste had been dumped into our ocean based on these numbers.

Special thanks to the University of Denver’s Vicki Myhren gallery, Laleh Mehran as curator of the show, lucdecleir for providing gorgeous stock footage of the jellyfish used, as well as Hans Braxmeier, Alexander Kim, and Juan Pablo Arenas, for the images of plastic waste I was able to utilize for this piece.