COFA1002

This is the second ad for our magazine, for the fictional Museum of Earth and Nature, or MEN. This advertises their world famous Tree exhibition. In our future, development has eradicated most of the trees, further destroying the air, as trees help remove carbon from the air.

This is one of our ads in our publication. Luxury air masks.

I wanted it to mirror a lot of high end ads, usually selling luxury cars, or perfume. I also liked the idea of the tag line referencing the fact that being able to see a persons smile would be a precious thing.

If your mouth is covered by a mask, how do you communicate your moods easily, how to you kiss the people you love. It creates a barrier.

I also wanted there to be this irony that a magazine about fighting back against the government and their greed would then have an ad, that advertises air masks.

What if the most basic of human needs was unavailable or in rare supply?

Something more necessary than food, or even water.

I’m talking about air.

In the future my group has envisioned, the issue of air pollution has reached a climax, where the air is no longer breathable without masks, and clean air has become a commodity more precious than oil or gold.

This dystopian vision of a time 35 years into the future looks at the aftermath of some of the environmental issues we are experiencing in the present, from the loss of natural filters like trees, gas, fuel and carbon emissions to an ever rising of both water levels from global warming and the shear volume of waste we produce.

With all the awareness we have about the environmental impact of these behaviours, we still insist on upgrading our iphones, our computers, leaving acres of land filled with these discarded electrical objects.

In the movie Tomorrowland, the idea is explored that if humans are shown a dire future often enough, instead of tying to stop it from happening, we either give up and accept it, or actively work towards that future horror.

It offers the question of who the fate of the future lays with. We always talk about future generations doing better, but then that is what our previous generation said about us. If everyone looks to a future generation to fix the mistakes of the present, nothing will ever be fixed.

It is with this idea in mind that we have created our magazine CARBON.

Though only a small publication, in its pages, we aim to encourage participation, through both our art based work that can be reproduced with a handful of easy objects, and our rally to save our air.

On the 4th of May, 1983, Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed their work, Surrounded Islands, in Miami, Florida. The installation was completed 3 days later and stretched between the city of Miami, North Miami, the Village of Miami Shores and Miami Beach. 11 of the uninhabited islands were surrounded with 603,870 square meters of floating pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of the water and extending out 61 meters from each island. The fabric was generated from 79 fabric patterns to follow the contours of 11 differently shaped island. Surrounded Islands was tended to day and night by 120 monitors in inflatable boats and the man power of 430 people.

Surrounded Islands was a work of art undermining the various elements and ways in which the people of Miami live, between land and water. During the process of installing the polypropylene, marine and land crew collected debris from the eleven islands,  and carted it away after they had removed near forty tons of various garbage that included refrigerator doors, tires, kitchen sinks and an abandoned boats.  

“Taking care of the world’s ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today. Not only will this first cleanup array contribute to cleaner waters and coasts but it simultaneously is an essential step towards our goal of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This deployment will enable us to study the system’s efficiency and durability over time,” Boyan Slat

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch consists of 2 masses of swirling garbage islands, One between Hawaii and California and one near Japan. Plastics and other non-biodegradable materials that are thrown into the world’s oceans are swept there by ocean currents and continue to collect and grow posing an ever-growing danger to marine life.

The ocean can never dissolve the garbage only making it more dangerous by breaking it down to small particles of plastic known as micro plastics which can over time collect in marine animals and bird life eventually killing them. Over 100,000 mammals and over 1,000,000 sea birds die to this micro plastics each year.

Next year, The Ocean Cleanup company, founded by Slat will be deploying the world’s first ever stem to passively can the Earth’s ocean on a large scale. This machine was first generated as an idea when he went on a diving trip in Greece seeing more plastic that marine life. The machine will use the ocean’s natural currents to direct the debris together when it can then be collected into solid floating barriers and be recycled.

The ocean cleaning machine will span 2000m and will be launched off the coast of Japan’s Tsushima island next year starting the world’s biggest ocean cleanup.