E: encounters, ecologies, and ethics

Image one is from the interactive exhibit Plastic City: (Re) Creating Portland with Our Discards, where large quantities of discarded plastics were deposited on a walkway in the middle of the Portland State University campus each week for a month to create encounters with plastics for children and the larger campus community. 

Image two is from the creation phase of the winter lights exhibit The Secret Underground: A Glow World Experience. Images of trash and discarded toys were projected along the walls of the entrance to the exhibit and were intended to look like layers of human refuse embedded into the geology of the earth. 

Image three, from the same exhibit, shows how digital photos and videos were projected throughout the site to give exhibit goers a sense of the complex ecologies of the secret underground world of winter in that region. Along with the speculatively fabulated ecologies of worms, humans, waste, bones, animals, and crystals, comes a complicated ethics as the public comes to realise that “We (humans) are not alone in our common worlds; and secondly that these worlds are not only about us” (Taylor & Giugni, 2012).