Recycling should be second nature now, but once you toss a plastic bottle into the dark abyss of a public bin, well — that’s it. Why give it a second thought? ReFILL is an interactive installation that gives a glimpse at the pile-up of would-be trash that’s destined for a second life; everything that goes in is scanned super quick, then projected onto an adjacent building like a big game of urban Plinko.
Digital artist Lukasz Karluk came up with the idea for this year’s Vivid Sydney festival of lights — a perfect venue considering how many extra folks generally come out for cool city-wide events and, despite everyone’s best efforts, produce a bunch of extra garbage in the process.
So Karluk, along with Pete Stopniak and Nick Clark, created a custom plywood box with a trapdoor for a top; any item placed on it is photographed before it falls into the hole, then the pic is shown bouncing down a wall, hitting windows and doors in “real time” all the way down, until it rests at the bottom with the growing collection of discards.
Making recycling fun was part of the goal, but it’s pretty cool to see all our junk in a different context. Based on all the cheeky hands that made their way into the mass, it looks as if people were so damn excited to recycle that they were willing to do it without even having any real object to throw in; that, or Canadians have a serious surplus of palms and fingers and a booming trade in gently used body parts. [Julapy]