Art Installation Plan
Angel, Lana, and I want to collaborate with our classmates to create an art work inspired by food delivery packaging. Ordering meals from Eleme, Meituan, and other food delivery services is quite frequent in our school, but with each order comes an excess of plastic wrapping that is promptly discarded. Ordering just one meal generates a lot of trash, from plastic bags to plastic straws to receipts to single-use utensils.
To create this installation, we will collect unsoiled packaging waste that comes from food delivery for the next two weeks. We hope to collect plastic bags, thermal packaging, unused utensils, receipts, straws, and any other plastic packaging. We will ask our roommates and friends to collect their own trash, so we can show just how much waste is generated from just three different social groups. When we collect enough material, we will then begin to decide how to visually arrange them in a thoughtful yet impactful way. We anticipate that we will create a mosaic of some sort with the collected waste.
Community Group Progress
On Monday, September 20th, our group went to No. 2 Garden for the first time. We spoke with Mr. Zhao on which sections of the garden he believed might be improved. He mentioned that they do not have the most effective watering system and must water the vast lawn with a single hose, which is inconvenient. They attach the hose to little pipes that run across the garden above the plants, but it gets in the way when people want to walk through. After inspecting their present watering system, we determined that resolving the problem using recycled waste was most likely beyond our realistic capabilities.
Group picture with community member
Watering system
However, we saw a little tub of koi fish in the yard and inquired whether the water was changed on a regular basis. Mr. Zhao informed us that the water is changed, but because Shanghai’s water quality is fairly high, they do not need to replace the water all that frequently. Because the water was a little muddy, we thought we might make a gadget to assist them use the tub water for watering plants when they changed the water. Mr. Zhao pointed out that they already had a tool for this, which is a plastic hose with one end inserted into the water and pushed out onto the grass. It was a useful tool, but we observed that the water flowing out of the hose wasn’t very powerful, thus it took a while to empty.
We decided to try to enhance the hose by adding a foot pump and a hose head to create a stronger stream that might cover more land. We may try using a bottle as the foot pump and punching holes in a piece of plastic to generate a broader spray.