USA – PETMAT

Head in the Clouds

Head in the clouds is a pavilion built on the occasion of figment’s 2013 ‘city of dreams art celebration’ in New York. The sculpture was assembled by Jason Klimoski and Wesley Chang from KCA architects, who needed 53,780 recycled plastic bottles and milk containers – this amount is consumed in NYC in about 1 hour. While the milk jugs form the exterior cloud visually, the interior is created from smaller 16 and 24 ounce PET bottles filled with blue colour water evocating the feeling of being in the middle of a cloud. This all is held up with an aluminium frame. The structure can shelter approximately 50 people. The installation ran for approximately 2 months from february 2013.

Head in the Clouds section, picture: Lesley Chang

Plastic Bottle Greenhouse

Jasmine Zimmerman created an open-roofed spherical house which measures 12 x 12 x 6 feet (3.6 x 3.6 x 1.8 meter) created out of thousands of PET bottles. With this structure she wanted to point out the fact that Americans waste over 30 billion of PET bottles a year, only 10% of which are recycled.
The structure is created by glueing PET bottles together with hot glue pistol (which by the way renders the bottles unrecyclable in any normal fashion). As an object for raising awareness it can be considered successful however, because she made two installations at festivals (Bumbershoot and City Sol Festival in New York) where people themselves actually added their disposable PET bottles to the structure. In that way the structure grew in an almost organic fashion and people were more directly confronted with the waste issue.

(Pop)Culture

(POP)Culture shelter is a project by Garth Britzmann who intended to create a canopy shading device above a parking lot. 1581 empty soda bottles of 20oz (0.6 liters) were filled with a small amount of colored water. The basic structure of the canopy is a frame structure. The bottles are attached by strings. It took 27 volunteers 12,5 days to connect the bottles to the strings and erect the final construction. The object stood on site for three months. It was demolished because it was discovered that mold had formed in the bottles.
The projects’ geometry was created with the use of 3D modelling software Rhinoceros with scripting in Grasshopper plug-in for this program. First the surface was designed, and after that the length of the strings was derived, and also the color of the water for the bottles, which was related to the height from the plane.

Morimoto restaurant

The Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed a spectacular wall incorporating 17 400 PET bottles of 0,5 liter for the interior of the Morimoto restaurant in New York City. The bottles are filled with mineral water. The bottles are mounted horizontally on a frame by means of couplers. There are also LED lights at the couplers so that in this way the wall becomes a lighting element in the restaurant. The electricity is led horizontally on a bracing. The wall is two floors high.

Dancing on Joy’s Horizon

Dale Wayne works with groups and individuals across the country, transforming recycled plastic bottles to create her installation Dancing on Joy’s Horizon: Bridging Communities. Participants cut and paint recycled plastic bottles, transforming them into glasslike sparkling blossoms and ribbons. Ms. Wayne then attaches their contributions to panels to be installed onto the fence that wraps the Kent County Courthouse during ArtPrize 2014.

Cup City

Legge Lewis Legge Cup City was a temporary interactive art installation comprised of a 2000- square-foot structure built using rented chain link fence panels at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, September 23–25, 2005, in Austin, Texas. Over the course of three days, concertgoers filled the structure with approximately 25,000 recycled cups and bottles. Budget $5000 Commissioned by and presented in collaboration with Austin Green Art. The walls of the lounge were slowly filled with disposable containers by concert-goers and volunteers, many of whom spent hours arranging and rearranging patterns in the chain link panel walls. Cup City engaged and displayed a portion of the Festival crowds’ stream of consumption, diverting approximately 25,000 used bottles, cups and cans into its ever-changing web.

Archives