Your New Frontier

Plastic, once celebrated as a revolutionary material, has become an enduring symbol of waste and environmental harm. While listening to corporate films promoting plastic production, I was struck by the way they framed it with excitement and limitless potential—interwoven with references to war, economic expansion, and resource extraction. The phrase “Your New Frontier,” taken from one of these films, encapsulates the colonial mindset that persists in how the United States offloads its waste onto other nations. The frontier is no longer unexplored land; it is the clean water and soil of countries that inherit our discarded materials.

Your New Frontier was made using US Census Bureau data on the export of plastic waste from the US abroad from the years 2003-2024. The animation is accompanied by sonified data from the same dataset and Public Domain audio from industrial films from the mid-twentieth century promoting the United State’s power and prowess in the manufacturing of plastics.

Our Human Remains

Our Human Remains utilizes the same export data and visualization process as Your New Frontier but instead visualizes each year in a static physical format and stratifies that data into four subcategories: ethylene, styrene, vinyl chloride, and nesoi.

The visualizations are drawn in sharpie using a plotter drawing machine. The acrylic panes are repurposed scrap plastic, mounted to white wooden boards. The inked panes float about a half inch above the wood, casting a colorful shadow.