Thank you all for coming. My poster is over there. I don't have a screen. Can everyone see? Yes. Yes? Yeah, you can see? What does that say? Okay, great. Just checking. Right. So I'm quite new but... Okay, great. Just checking. Right. So I'm quite new to the PhD department. And when my research is trash, I mean, it's not shit, but it is trash. I practice that. Nobody loves. It started all with this animal here, which is the hermit crab. As you know, I was born in the city, and I still live in the city, and struggling with artist's life of having no money in the bank account, I thought maybe I could source my materials from the city, which is my nature, my environment. And as I was sc from the city, which is my nature, my environment. And as I was scarring the city for trash and, of course, plastic trash, which is most abundant trash in the city, I found myself being this animal here who also scars its nature for protection and shelter. And I thought, okay, I'm becoming this animal in this environment. And, but of course, the very meaning of natural and what nature is, is very different right now, also in the city environment. And it's constantly changing. To the better or worse, I'm gonna say to the worse. And this is, of course, related to the imitation because I'm basically following what this animal is doing. And this kind of change in what natural means in an urban environment is also shown in this case of a bird's nest found in Finland. A scientist pulled it out from its nest and there were a stork's nest basically. And in its world they found different bits of plastic trash which dates back to 60 years. So it's basically an archeology of a city done by a bird. And it's historically relevant to humans. And this kind of phenomenon that it revolves around the material plastic is very fascinating to me. And this is where all my kind of research started. I don't have a lot of research today. I'm just going to tell you five or six fun stories. And which brings me back to seeing value in trash. Second point is trash value. I like this two words because trash and value is kind of opposite of each other. And one story I can tell you about this is that in anyone from America here? You the USA? No? Okay. They have a lot of car theft, not cars being stolen, but things in cars being stolen. So thieves come on to the cars, break the window, and take whatever's in it. And one product came out of this is called Trash Blanket. It's a big blanket. And if you just throw it onto the car seat, it looks like there's a pile of trash on it even though the blanket itself is not made of trash but it is it looks like trash so therefore it has value right and which is really interesting to me because i come from industrial design and as know, timelessness is one key element when you're trying to design something beautiful and everlasting. But this trash blanket will never lose its value over time because the more weather it gets, the more damage it gets, it has more value. So we have reached the pinnacle of timeless design with this trash blanket. Of course, so here we have the element of conflict, which is death in the city. And of course, imitation because we're imitating... Oh, there's another one here. We're imitating what we see in urban, i'm gonna say nature because that's how it is uh next to talking about conflict we're gonna go to the next point uh another conflict as you know geopolitics not great at the moment everyone has a a lot of, you know, state of crisis. Even though we're in the safe country of Austria, we still worry a lot. And I'm sure you heard about, so I'm really into 3D printing, and I'm sure you all heard about Luigi Malone, who killed the CEO with his ghost gun, 3D printed ghost gun. Yeah, this is only the iceberg of it because the current modern warfare that's happening in Ukraine and Gaza, they're all using 3D printing for especially drones and bombs. So they use drones that are publicly available. So they use drones that are publicly available, but to attach grenades on them, they use 3D printing to attach the grenade and drop them wherever they need it. So this kind of narrative of new technology, new material, being used in places that we don't even think of every day, I call this plastic culture. And that's basically the whole theme of this. And let's see. Okay, we got conflict. And I think that's it. Thank you. And next, let's go on to filtration, No, I think that's it. Thank you. Next, let's go on to filtration, which is the guy in the mask. Oh, I didn't even talk about the image. So you see an Airsoft player, so not a real soldier, but Airsoft player, who's wearing a trash ghillie. Do you know what a ghillie suit is? Anyone play FSP? Okay, a ghillie suit is usually made from fake grass. So if you wear it like a jacket and hide in the bushes, you blend into nature. But this person has devised a ghillie suit made of trash because in nature we always see trash. It's in the sea, it's in the mountains, and it doesn't look out of place. And this, I would call it trash aesthetics in the form of trash culture. And this kind of shows how we see or observe nature, because the very meaning of that is changing. Let's go to filtration. Sky-marine masks, as you know, in Corona times, everybody wore masks. Masks are made of polypropylene, polyethylene, and could not live without them. We filter air. We filter water. We filter a lot of different things. And plastic is in every one of them. And it's not recyclable because it's used in medicine or used for sanitary products. And here we have safety as a keyword. And the environmental issue that we have with plastics, it's not just about recycling and just switching to different material. It's not as simple as that. switching to different material. It's not as simple as that. Early on we saw the examples of using mycelium as a replaced product of plastic. But there's just so much vast uses of plastics in everyday life. We cannot replace all of them. Not in time. I believe it's already too late. And this is something to think about. I guess we could also put industry there. Because I talked about the medical industry. And let's go to the next industry, which is fashion. I mean, you all know about fast fashion. I don't have to talk about that today. But one phenomenon that I witnessed is that, because there's a soldier-like person here, that the uniforms, I was in the military, so the uniform I had to wear was green, brown, black. It comes from imitation, not imitation, okay, black, it comes from imitation. Another imitation? Okay. Imitation of nature. And of course, that was recycled in the industrial sense into fashion, right? In the 90s, people wore cargo pants, right? Military patterned jackets. We've seen those German military uniform jackets that the hipsters used to wear. I also did. And so now we have... Oh, one more, sorry. We got nature. and we got conflict, which is the military. We got nature influencing conflict, which is, sorry, I'm repeating myself. The military uniform, the patterns on it, which is influencing the fashion industry and casual wear, and also fast fashion, which is, again, influencing the nature itself because it's all going back to the landfill. And it's a cycle, right? It's a loop. And let's fast forward a little bit, and then we might even have like ordinary jackets that are based on the patterns of human trash or human waste. Like imagine that, like you have a new product online, you saw its jacket, and then there's patterns of Coca-Cola, I don't know, cigarette packaging on it as a new trend. I mean, it's hard to imagine now, but who knows what happens in the fashion industry, right? Another one is elastic polymers. This also industry. Right. This also industry. We may often talk about plastic. We think about PET bottles, electric appliances. I'm getting a phone call. But one material, one polymer that we don't often think of is rubber of course rubber comes from rubber trees, they're organic we use a lot of synthetic rubber between the world war 1 and 2 there wasn't enough natural rubber thank you and they had to produce synthetic rubber, right? And do you know where we used, which industry used the most natural rubber? Can you think? Tires? Tires, exactly. Thank you. So our cars we have, we drive the smaller cars that seats four-seaters. They use synthetic rubber, yes, but trucks, airplanes cannot use synthetic rubber because it's too brittle. If you think of an airplane going up high in the sky, really cold, below zero degrees, and it comes down, contacts the asphalt, and becomes like 500 degrees hotter. Synthetic rubber cannot withstand this and it will break. So they have to use natural rubber. Natural rubber comes from South America, but not anymore because they all died. There was one rubber tree that the farmers propagated and became a big plantation, which I said industry, yes. And they all come from, they all have same DNA base. They are clones. But in the 1950s, there was a blight. They had diseases and it all died. Not a single one survived, but they did manage to get some to South Asia. And they're the only produce of natural rubber there. And those trees survived in South Asia because of corona. Because there was less people traveling, less plants traveling between countries. The blight didn't spread. and they're safe for now. Once those trees are dead, no more planes, no more trucks, no trucks, no product. It's a total chaos. And the polymer industry is more fragile than you think. And we go on in everyday lives not thinking about this. And I also believe this is a very important part of this plastic culture that I frame it. And next is microplastics. We got health. We got, let me just go this later. I mean, you all know microplastics, it's everywhere. It's found on the top of the elves, it's found on the bottom of the Mariana Trench. We know this already. What I find kind of funny, because I'm kind of, I'm trying to think trash in a different way, I'm putting value in what we don't see as value. Microplastics can enter your bloodstreams. It's fine all over your body, in your brain, in your blood, and also in your waist. It also means that it can be sexually transmitted, which means microplastic could be a proof of love. I got these microplastics from my partner. It's a proof of love. At our most intimate time, we are sharing microplastics, which also means that it can be inherited from my parents, to me, to my parents. And I see it as a family heirloom. It's not just DNA that is inherited. It's all sorts of things, including... I went the wrong way. It's over here. Yeah, I'll move on. And I'm going to tell my last bit which is Anthropocene and Plasticine. I'm sorry you heard of these words before. I saw in an interview at the Tate with Donna Haraway, it was about five, six years ago, and she says we shouldn't use the word Anthropocene because it's human centered word. We should use the word plasticine because now we focus the matter to the material, which is problematic. I agree with her and actually don't agree with her at the same time because I don't see a difference between the two. They're the same thing. Human culture is plastic culture as we know it now. And this is basically what I mean by plastic culture, plastic aesthetics, and this is the start of my research. And as an observer and an artist, I'm curious to see what comes out of it. Thank you. Professor Lee, could I maybe have you as a questionnaire? Very impressive, and thank you for the presentation. And I just wonder, do you think that this plastic culture is going to be ended in the near future? And what do you, I know what you are talking about. And I really lovely to see, you know, that this plastic value is cyclic. is cyclic, but I just wonder, there is an alternative way of replacing this kind of plastic, or what you really want to say about it? So, because you know, just in a social science, or science, because I'm a social scientist, there is always a conclusion, but you know, this kind of talk, we don't have any specific answer, but I'm quite sure you have a part of answer, so I just want to hear from you. Yeah, my position and my opinion is pretty clear on this. Even if we replace all plastics to an alternative material, an eco-friendly material, the damage we have done, the accumulated plastic that we have, it's not reversible. We have to live with it. And it's not about changing how it was, it's about finding ourselves living in the natural world, which has a very different meaning from maybe 50, 100 years ago. And this is my position on it. And like I said, as an observer and artist artist I'm curious to see how this evolves yeah thank you very much hand over I was thinking about the half-life time of plastic, right? And how can that maybe be reflected in your work and in your thoughts? And what else did I write down? Ah, yeah, and then Congo also used to be a big rubber supplier for World War I. There was this conference, the Berlin conference, organized by Otto von Bismarck, where they basically decided to carve out Africa, and they needed rubber for World War I, and they got it from Congo, right? So what are, I don't know, historic, colonial aspects of the work that you've been presenting? But these are really just two brief thoughts. Curious with Fernando. Wow. I think it's everything itself there. Some ideas only. This place where the trees came from the Amazon, there is a city there, a ghost city right now, it's called Fort Landia. Henry Ford was the one that started to extract it. there's no way to do it industrially scale it, but maybe one day you go there to see the ruin of the city and the particular knowledge of the people that live there right now. Also came in mind many of the artists that work with trash, like recycling through the printing or whatever of fabric, but also the fungi now they found this fungi that eat also the petroleum etc so how we can mix all together to maybe to to fasten in this approach to plastic on everyday life through art so this power of this this stuff were discussing today, how narratives are performative. So it's more people, it's talking about something and it's difficult to understand also mostly when we are in a scientific, more duro more strong scientific ambience but in art we don't need to you know to have any specific or very measurable solution because some things are impossible to measure so how through histories and through stuff we are doing in different ways different ways to deal with the material, to collect it or to recycle. We can move things faster. I don't know, this is a challenge. You have very well mapped what is going on. We have plastic in our brain right now, all of us. So how to deal with that. One more thought. I think it was Jenny Odell who did an artist in residency at her local trash or garbage site in San Francisco. So maybe that's also an interesting thing for you to do for Linz, like to do an whatever, internship or something at the local trash site or garbage. I actually applied for the Linzage who pick up the trash in the morning they didn't take me I think my German was not good enough for them but recycling center they have it in Linz and I do intend to visit them it's just when it comes to investigations and people see me and say can I look at your facility we intend to visit them. It's just, when it comes to like investigations and people see me, I say, can I look at your facility? They're like, why are you here? Maybe you can do a group tour or a class tour or something. Yeah. I remember a project from a guy that's called Mundano that he works in Brazil. His project is called pimp my carroza how to say the the the the this thing that people carry the trash that uh homeless pin truck pin yeah so he worked with them to to make it beautiful so these people go around the city with this like tuning stuff and have a huge moment right now putting people together and giving information maybe you can find this called Mundano yeah actually very good hint and we have to go through the whole archive of digital communities because this one won a prize at digital communities and I think there's a lot of trash projects via digital communities because this one won a prize at digital communities and I think there's a lot of trash projects via digital communities that we actually find it will find in the archive that's also a good hint for research thank you