I remember a friend talking about a magazine they created with this tagline called “pick me up” and thought how amazing that hook up line was. In shops, everything popular is put in the shop window so you can “keep up with the Jones”.
Disused objects are things people have fallen out of love with and that are thrown away. Even those of us who get rid of them, we put them in a black bag like a corpse where they’re never seen again. For some people, they can’t be bothered to even do that, so you’ll see mattresses, TVs and table legs being thrown out or flytipped. At the London Marathon, there were as many plastic bottles strewn across the road as there were runners. Imagine how they could have been repurposed. If a plastic bottle had a mini artwork, how many would have picked it up? Call it what you want — nudge, participatory art of a potential Turner prize in the making.
In our consumerist society, we are asked to buy more and recycle more. Why are weekly bin collections such a political hot potato? Surely, we should be arguing that we should all waste less in the first place and reuse what we can.
But when have you felt better than when you’re making something? Getting people to find plastic bottles with “pick me up” stickers on them and identify “what the object is now” and “what it’s been made out of” provokes people into wondering what happens to all the bottles thrown onto the street. What could you do with the rubbish you throw away? Could you turn it into something new?
What could you hide in your local area to help you understand how people would react to the introduction of a new policy or service?
