»Gravity«, 2007 by Aleksandra Mir. The 20m high rocket was built out of junk and had smoke coming out of its windows. It stood in the Roundhouse, London, a former industrial train turning station that has since become a permanent performance space. The materials took five months to source from various scrap yards in England. Most of it is steel or fiberglass, plus a few tractor tires and several industrial fans, and the bottom part is a discarded tank from a toothpaste factory. Video.
»Waste Man«, 2006, was made over a six-week period at the end of summer 2006 out of about 30 tonnes of waste materials that had been gathered by the Thanet waste disposal services and by local people, and deposited in Dreamland, the area of Margate next to the sea and close to the station that had traditionally been the site of a vast funfair. The piece burnt in 32 minutes, sending showers of sparks over the crowd of spectators. By Antony Gormley.
»Space Junk Spotting« 2006, is a project composed of mechanical and programming equipment linked to a database at a U.S. government-owned space observatory; this database contains the fullest possible data on the extent of the pollution and presents remarkable scientific methods for determining the position of space junk. In this way, the wider Internet public is offered a folder of information about space debris, which is strewn across the popular three-dimensional interface Google Earth. The tactical potential of this catalogue is the possibility it provides for finding a creative and constructive solution to the problem of reusing material whose position in usable orbits is already determined, without the enormous initial costs that arise whenever rockets are shot into space. By Saso Sedlacek.
»Beggar 2.0« another project by Saso Sedlacek is a robot for the materially deprived in Tokyo. It is made of old electronics and computer spare parts. The original 1.0 was tested in Slovenian shopping malls where it is forbidden to beg, but no such rule was made for robots. The new upgrade version of Beggar robot made at IAMAS institute in Japan was tested in the beginning of July 2006 on Tokyo streets where begging isn’t really a frequent phenomena and where interface communication is ubiquitous.Video.
