lizwilsonmediastudent

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Living Sustainably

Do you think your life is sustainable and how can you tell? 

At first I thought yes, because I recycle and I often wear clothes for a really long time. But now I think not really. I realised I don’t think about what I buy when it comes to clothes, food product or travel. Up until recently I didn’t do any research into sustainable brands or know about the impact fast fashion has on the environment. 

How does your lifestyle compare to a peer (choose one)? 

In comparison to my friend Joana, I think I am living more sustainably. She buys tons of clothes and hardly wears them and is constantly changing her style and following trends. I think it’s important not to get tricked by companies into thinking you need stuff like this. 

How does your lifestyle compare to someone in another country? (choose a friend, family member or an example found online) 

I think consumption in my country is probably one of the highest because we have a really disparate share of the wealth. I realised this in the video about 100 people on earth. Until then, I hadn’t really considered myself to be rich or to buy or own a lot of stuff, probably because I’m comparing to celebrities on Instagram, but it’s actually pretty insane how unevenly the world’s wealth is spread, more so than anticipated. 

Whose responsibility is it to start living more sustainably?

I believe it is everyone’s responsibility to come together and make change. We can keep blaming big companies and brands but at the end, we are the consumers making choices too. 

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Life’s inventory

Inspiration + initial proposal

I want to take a look into the data of personal identity and more specifically how possessions construct our sense of self. A few factors have contributed to this. For one, the rise in social media and the growing desire for hyper-identity (namely Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), the sheer volume of online marketing coming from all angle as a daily event eg.- Facebook advertising, Ebay, Groupon/Livingsocial/Ozsale/TheIconic/ASOS emails and finally, my recent dealings with possessions- moving house, traveling and the attempted selling of old clothes/furniture/stuff which have caused me to re-evaluate my spending and general accumulation of ‘stuff’.

Lately I’ve found myself feeling left out, cheap, embarrassed, unfashionable and ultimately unhappy- with my inability to spend. The simple act of socialising can be a tricky task when you don’t have money. I find it concerning that a person can feel as though they don’t enjoy free time because they can’t spend money.

I find myself in a grey area of consumerism. I’m completely aware that the never ending desire to fill my life with ‘stuff’ is a simply a result of a capitalist economy, for which I am a constant target to contribute and I acknowledge that these feelings and desires are not inherently my own but a result of the society in which I live, however, I make a conscious choice to be part of this- I continue to spend, accumulate and discard. I find it curious that although I find the entire concept of consumerism sickening, I can’t seem to quit. I seemingly can’t avoid the pressures of this ‘spending society’.

For this project I’d like to deal with questions such as

To what extent do possessions make the person, build their identity?

How does spending affect a person socially?

How much stuff does one person accumulate in a week, a month, a year, a decade?

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A project by JeongMee Yoon. The project explores the trends in cultural preferences and the differences in the tastes of children (and their parents) from diverse cultures, ethnic groups as well as gender socialization and identity. The work also raises other issues, such as the relationship between gender and consumerism, urbanization, the globalization of consumerism and the new capitalism.

http://madebysix.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/the-pink-blue-project-2005-ongoing/

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Lisa Milroy

In these, rows of patent leather shoes exuded a sultry, polished newness; ugly charity-shop vases were painted with the dull lustre of clay; and light bulbs were neatly arranged as if laid out on the table of a hardware shop. Surprisingly, the results were oppressive – they didn't celebrate consumerism and wealth so much as the nerdy compulsiveness of a collector. Later paintings, like her portraits of tanned blond-haired girls, were more in keeping with the aspirational consumer society of the 80s, enthralled by glossy magazine adverts. Wearing Ray-Bans, with peroxide hair swept back, the subjects epitomised upper-class privilege.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/09/artist-lisa-milroy

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Photographer Chris Jordan explores the phenomenon of American consumerism by making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data. Cans Seurat depicts 106,000 aluminum cans in the form of George Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte; 106,000 being the number of cans used in the US every thirty seconds

 http://honestlywtf.com/art/running-the-numbers/

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'Family Stuff' -Huang Qingjun

Chinese photographer Huang Qingun spent nearly a decade traveling around to various rural communities in China, asking families to take everything they owned and carefully arrange them outdoors for a picture. The project offers a glimpse into the lives of those people living away from the big cities, where wealth and luxury have been exploding in recent years.

Huang tells the BBC:

Most people thought what I was proposing was not normal. When I explained I wanted to set up a photo, that it would involve taking everything out of their house and setting it up outside, that took quite a lot of explaining. But almost all of them, when they realised what I was trying to do, they understood the point. One advantage of travelling to remote, poor areas was that people didn’t have many possessions. They’re not like people from the city, who have so much stuff that if you asked them to do it they’d reply it was too much effort.

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Decoding greenwashing in fast fashion:

Zaful 

They say: “We’re serious about making sure every single person in that supply chain is safe at work, respected, and earns a living wage.”

Sounds good, but the statement is pretty vague. Being “serious about making sure” and simply “paying” a living wage are not the same thing. The wording isn’t clear enough for us. 

My partner and I couldn’t find any proof of how Zaful is ensuring its workers are treated and paid fairly. Zaful lacks transparency and provides insufficient relevant information about how it reduces its impact on people, the planet, and animals. 

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Another cool example of data collection and consumerism. This artist decided to draw everything she bought so that she’d recognise how much stuff she was buying. 

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I found this really cool example of data being visualised by artist Gabriele Galimberti. 

Shot over a period of 18 months, Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s projectToy Stories compiles photos of children from around the world with their prized possesions—their toys. Galimberti explores the universality of being a kid amidst the diversity of the countless corners of the world; saying, “at their age, they are pretty all much the same; they just want to play.”

But it’s how they play that seemed to differ from country to country. Galimberti found that children in richer countries were more possessive with their toys and that it took time before they allowed him to play with them (which is what he would do pre-shoot before arranging the toys), whereas in poorer countries he found it much easier to quickly interact, even if there were just two or three toys between them.

There were similarites too, especially in the functional and protective powers the toys represented for their proud owners. Across borders, the toys were reflective of the world each child was born into—economic status and daily life affecting the types of toys children found interest in. Toy Stories doesn’t just appeal in its cheerful demeanor, but it really becomes quite the anthropological study.

http://www.featureshoot.com/2013/03/photos-of-children-from-around-the-world-with-their-most-prized-possessions/

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I really love Apple products. I found this video which I can kind of relate to, as now I understand that Apple’s brand messaging is a lot to do with creativity and this makes sense to me as I’m a creative person so I respond to the colours and art that they use. 

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Blog entry task No.1 (Lesson 2): 

Collect a data set from your belongings with a minimum of one data point. (eg. colour, fabric, year of purchase, frequently used/ sometimes used/seldom used/ never used. Represent the data in any way you want. Annotation: What does your data tell you? 100 - 200 words. Ok so I decided to take out all of my clothes (not including socks and undies) and sort them into categories of cotton, polyester and other.  The results were 63% polyester, 22% cotton and 15% other.  I pretty much had no idea what my clothes were made of before this and didn’t really understand the difference, except for wool which is warm and comes from a sheep.  Now I know a bit more about why Polyester is used in ‘fast fashion’ and what it does to the environment. 

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Here are some examples I found interesting in the Hungry Planet series we checked out. It was super interesting to see how wildly different the food consumption habits are around the globe. I’d like to see how it would look with my family if we put it all out on the table. 

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Consumption!

https://www.storyofstuff.org/

Ok so we watched this video “The Story of Stuff” and wow, I had no idea that the idea to sell us stuff for the economy was actually designed... 

I’m starting to feel like I’m being played now. But I still like clothes and fashion from an artistic point of view. This is ok right?

Definitely making me rethink a few things though!