MAPPING AS A MEANS OF APPROPRIATION

To understand a site as complex as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that has been the cause of much speculation but that has yet to be clearly defined and fully understood, (it’s size is almost impossible to confirm with sources describing it to be from the size of Texas to the size of the continental U.S.); my tactic is to map the forces and conditions that define it, from winds and oceanic currents, to boat routes and amounts and types of plastic dumped into the oceans. Using mapping techniches as a way of appropriation of this almost mythical region; uncharted territory, a territory to be discovered, conquered, colonized. My system creates a dynamic relationship between itself and the environment on the site and uses the suspended plastic to create a new substrate and generate a synthetic ecology formed by the material discarded by the U.S.A. and Japan.