#resinhate

Most of the resin you see all over the internet…it looks…. interesting. I went to research some things in google trends and the graph shows the google searches related to resin art from 2018 till now and as you can see…it significantly spiked up (Google Trends, 2022). Yes, I mean it looks interesting. I play a song created by and artist called Woah Dude: “it cost that much cause it takes me freaking hours, it cost that much cause I don’t have super powers…you need to pay for my skills cause exposure doesn’t pay my bills. It cost that much cause it takes me freaking hours (I am singing this)” (Woah Dude - YouTube). Resin for DIY crafts is a polymer based thermosetting liquid plastic that comes in 2 parts 1) as a vehicle and 2) as hardener when mixed together with a bunch of different elements it cures and hardens into a solid block (Resin | chemical compound, 1998). It is essentially a transparent substance but we can always moderate its opacity according to what our creativity calls.

5-minute crafts is the biggest DIY based content publisher in the world. It is YouTube’s 13th most subscribed channel with 77.7 million subscribers all over the world (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019). More than 48.8% of their content revolves around resin, plastic and silicon-based art. And it is safe to say that a lot of similar DIY content creators with a considerable amount of influence are producing similar kind of content.

So, I was naturally curious, why is that? Why are people are consuming a lot of media that revolves around a plenty of health and safety risk and ecological damage? Why is it made to look that attractive and what happens to that piece of beef when it’s dipped into a vat of immortality, spoiler alert: it still rots, resin is useless.

Let’s start to look at some chemical properties:

1)     Resin is water resistant and this is why it was invented to protect water facilities in place of metal piping’s because they would understandably get corroded and resin lining will deter any type of chemical reaction (Erickson, 1961) or at least that was a wide public perception around that time because it is not true at all now. Studies have shown resin over the time becomes a carcinogenic material just as asbestos and is a known marine life pollutant.

2)     Its plastic; its transparent. Artists and creators like the fact that its’s transparent. So, it can “cover” and “protect” a lot of fragile art and paintings and prevent it from damaging. The reason I am using air quotes is because that is also not at all true. Resin chemically bonds with applied object in a way that it becomes practically impossible to remove the protection layer without destroying the very prized creation. It also negates the possibility of having any kind of sensorial exploration of the object because resin essential closes all pore to stop oxidation. There is also an element of exclusivity. Excluding from epistemological interaction.

3)     But I want to focus at its third property; resin as an art medium. Sometimes artist use it portray a feeling of suspension like a flower that never sheds a petal, or a piece of glitter that is floating mid air or like a river that is frozen in time. The medium is also used for sculpting a molding objects and forms. Some of them are functional most of them are useless and dangerous. They can also be used as diffusing object to play with lighting in art. And since the refractive index of resin is 1.50 -1.80 which is near to water that is 1.30… (Su, Fu and Pan, 2002) it makes resin reflective it gives a look of gloss and shine.

4)     Resin also nature wise is a very corrosive material to human skin and lungs because it works under the pretense of an exothermic reaction and there have been many reported accidents ranging from 1st to 4th degree burns on skin and fumes that cause silicosis and cancer in the lungs (Health Effects from Overexposure to Epoxy, 2022). As you can also see in the label there are a lot of protective warnings and list of side effects.

Now there are certain words from my previous statement I wanted to highlight and unpack because I think it draws a “clear” picture of what I want to express in my presentation.

First is exploring the aesthetic of transparency. Transparency is a qualitative description of an object. There are a lot of well documented studies that highlight various points about why we are starting to like transparent aesthetic more and more these days. It starts from post modern era where artists and architects started this movement called structural expressionism where the viewer of the object or in this case a building is able to see the details and construction of the building post production (arhimanisharma, 2020). The viewer can get a sense of knowledge and context of method and structure. This also stems from the fact that a lot of past architecture has been ornamental and feudal and the architects want to show inner workings of an organization essentially stripping away all the visual hinderances and ornamentation that is taking feedback from the public that was expressing a lot of lack of trust in various governing bodies and politics (arhimanisharma, 2020) .... Now we also like transparency because we are in age of overwhelming amount of information and surveillance and are constantly “encouraged” to show all side and aspects of our (Hall, 2007) life -that’s a LinkedIn joke. A suspended object in transparent resin gives the viewer an experience of observing something from all the directions. Funny thing, you can do the same exercise, it just requires a pair of working eyes and a hand that can pick up and turn an object in different ways and you don’t even have to pollute the earth for it.

Second is durability. Resin artists love the concept of permanence. But I am wondering why do we like concept of durability? Studies have shown that because it mirrors with our need to live a very long life most of it looking like a 20-year-old in 60s (Youth is Currency: Why We’re Afraid to Age, 2022) and so we want our object to last as well. Let me ask you something…. if life of an organic object doesn’t end in freezing like that… why do we feel like it’s our personal responsibility to deny the organic object the fortune of going through the process of decomposing and going back to earth? Why does this piece of beef gets wasted like that. Any organic object dies as it gets subjected to a tremendous amount of heat due to Resin’s exothermic reaction so after freezing it looks dead and ugly…then what’s the purpose? Bro suspension? More like damnation.

3) Third word is Reflection/gloss or shine. As we see in life in general there is an acute need in the commercial world to make everything look nice and shiny…from our cellphones to our teeth we always need to see the cartoonish bling where we can see our face in. The explanation for this phenomenon is also layered. First is, it is a class thing. Shiny things always express someone’s affluence and let’s be honest the concept of blingy white teeth was invented in the late 1930s (teeth as a fashion statement., 2022), it was an aesthetic choice more than a medical one. Shiny things also represent the newness of any object like something is still untouched and not contaminated. And the last layer is we human being are evolutionarily evolved to look for fresh and clean source of water to use as a resource and looking at some of the reflective art reminds us of that and is why we feel more attracted towards it. So maybe the problem is, we are all thirsty (Silvia et al., 2017). I don’t know much but I am pretty sure that we are also running out of drinkable water pretty soon (courtesy of anthropogenic climate change) (Is the world running out of freshwater? | 2022) so maybe we cannot really fight our inclination to like clear aesthetics by drinking through it.

Articles upon articles have been published about how to create resin-based art and establish a full running business on it. But at what cost? I did the math and with each rising centimeter of deep pour plastic more 5,000 years get added…. that’s the time taken for it get decomposed. So, for a 10 cm block it will take 50,000 years for it to get decomposed. That is from ice age till now. And mean while the object will pollute the air, the soil and the marine life in carcinogenic ways. Most of the plastic waste of first world countries get dumped in third world countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia (Fates of plastic waste: Where does our plastic waste go? 2021). So now poor countries have to fight through oppression of poverty, colonization and carcinogenic waste too. Before going I want my presentation to end with this song I wrote.

it cost that much cause it takes me just 3 braincells, it cost that much cause I’m high on fumes as hell…you need to pay for my sins cause exposure doesn’t really Earth kill. It cost that much cause freezing a toenail is noble (I am singing this).

Bibliography

 •          Google Trends (no date) Google Trends. Available at: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-29%202022-11-29&q=resin%20art (Accessed: 29 November 2022).

 ·       Woah Dude - YouTube (no date) www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/c/woahdudestudio (Accessed: 8 December 2022).

 •          Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "acrylic compound". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Jul. 1998, https://www.britannica.com/science/acrylic-compound. Accessed 29 November 2022.

 •          Wikipedia Contributors (2019) List of most-subscribed YouTube channels, Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTube_channels.

 •          Erickson, C.R. (1961) ‘Uses of Epoxy Resins’, Journal (American Water Works Association), 53(12), pp. 1457–1460. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41257060 (Accessed: 29 November 2022).

 •          Su, W.-F., Fu, Y.-C. and Pan, W.-P. (2002) ‘Thermal properties of high refractive index epoxy resin system’, Thermochimica Acta, 392-393, pp. 385–389. doi:10.1016/S0040-6031(02)00124-7.

 •          Health Effects from Overexposure to Epoxy (2022) WEST SYSTEM. Available at: https://www.westsystem.com/safety/health-effects-from-overexposure-to-epoxy/#:~:text=Repeated%20skin%20contact%20with%20resins (Accessed: 29 November 2022).

 •          arhimanisharma (2020) THE STRUCTURAL EXPRESSIONISM OF ARCHITECTURE, AR Details. Available at: https://ardetails.home.blog/2020/06/22/the-structural-expressionism-of-architecture/.

 •          Hall, R. (2007) ‘Of Ziploc Bags and Black Holes: The Aesthetics of Transparency in the War on Terror’, The Communication Review, 10(4), pp. 319–346. doi:10.1080/10714420701715381.

 •          Youth is Currency: Why We’re Afraid to Age (2022) www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItE2mzGkutI&ab_channel=naomicannibal (Accessed: 30 November 2022).

 •          teeth as a fashion statement. www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i10v-5a9X0M&t=402s&ab_channel=MinaLe (Accessed: 30 November 2022).

 •          Silvia, P. J., Christensen, A. P., Cotter, K. N., Jackson, T. A., Galyean, C. B., McCroskey, T. J., & Rasheed, A. Z. (2018). Do People Have a Thing for Bling? Examining Aesthetic Preferences for Shiny Objects. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 36(1), 101–113.

 •          Is the world running out of freshwater? | News (no date) Wellcome. Available at: https://wellcome.org/news/world-running-out-freshwater.