Posted on: 21 August 2020
PLASTIC – CAN’T LIVE WITH IT, CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT comes to Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny.
Plastic: it is essential, yet it chokes our oceans. Plastic is cheap to create but expensive to dispose of. It can last forever but is often only used once. Plastic has changed our daily lives and our environment more than any other material.
PLASTIC – a touring exhibition, created by Science Gallery Dublin has launched in Donegal in partnership with Science Foundation Ireland and the Environmental Protection Agency as part of its nationwide tour.
The exhibition looks at how we cannot live with or without this destructive yet incredibly versatile material. It interrogates our current and future relationship with the material. The unsustainability of our relationship with plastic is well documented, but to stop using it completely is not an option.
Its use has revolutionised industrial design and more essentially, modern medicine relies on plastic so heavily that even the most basic medical procedures would be unimaginable without it.
Members of the public are invited to visit the exhibition at the Regional Cultural Centre until the end of 2020 and explore how we can responsibly use this versatile material, while fundamentally changing our approach to living with plastic.
PLASTIC National Co-ordinator Philip Smyth said:
In unusual COVID dominated times like these, it is easy to forget about other important topics let alone go into any depth. PLASTIC at the RCC presents visitors with the good the bad and factual about plastic in an entertaining and informative way. It doesn’t tell you what to think, but rather presents the future possibilities and lets you make up your own mind.
Local Donegal artist Ed Devane has been commissioned by Science Gallery Dublin to develop an exhibit that expresses the ubiquity of plastic and will see him work with the general public and young people, (online via Zoom) with the assistance of Foróige, Ireland’s leading youth organisation, over the coming weeks to create a piece of art PLASTIC SOUNDS that reflects how plastic surrounds us in our daily life, for better or worse.
PLASTIC SOUNDS is an interactive installation which immerses the listener in a soundscape of audio recordings crowdsourced from the public. The exhibition viewer / listener / interactor has some autonomy over their use of the components of the installation: linger a while in front of one of the speaker modules, and the sound will loop continuously, walk past and the sound will be played briefly. Multiple visitors can in effect perform with the system to make a unique auditory experience.
The exhibit will be unveiled as part of Culture Night in September 2020.
Ed Devane said:
I’m particularly excited about working with youth members from Foróige and having them part of the exhibition. My piece is not designed to be prescriptive or preachy but rather present a diverse collection of timbres and tones, some pleasant, some jarring, the piece draws parallels between plastic’s ubiquity and our conflicted relationship with it. I want to present that plastic is both good, bad and has a wide range of uses.
PLASTIC was created by Science Gallery Dublin at Trinity College Dublin, supported by Science Foundation Ireland. Science Gallery Dublin is part of the Science Gallery Network pioneered by Trinity College Dublin.
