Sensing, Sorting, Worlding: A Trash Workshop

Note: Participants must register for the workshop to take part in the interactive segment. If you were unable to register, you can still sit in on the verbal content.

A collaborative recycling workshop centered on practices of sensing, sorting, storytelling, worldbuilding, and trashing. Participants will be introduced to and engage with techniques for personal and multi-scalar perception, alongside methods of visual and environmental storytelling. Through exercises in spatial and temporal thinking, knowing, and being, the workshop introduces ideas of worlding and soft worldbuilding.

In an era determined by planned obsolescence, plastic excess, and extractive production, nearly everything made is prefigured and predefined as trash. From a building to a broken mug, a half-rotten banana peel to an entire existing ecology, which can be captured, modeled, and downloaded as .obj files from asset libraries and discarded in a desktop recycle bin, objects move between physical and digital environments and storage spaces where excess and disposal are normalized and made the default.

This workshop asks: what does it mean to sift through and revalue what has already been designated as trash? 

This workshop makes: an actual dumpster, a digital archive for collective sharing, sorting, and storytelling.

Through collective sorting, speculative and spatial storytelling, and material play, participants will recycle IRL/URL worlds of objects, files, and spaces. By recycling both materials and meanings—as a re-worlding practice—we may recontextualize discarded things, refigure and transgress their intended life, birth, and death cycles, and attach alternative functions, narratives, and embodiments to them.