Tales from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Plastic is everywhere. Coined as the ›Great Pacific Garbage Patch‹, a massive accumulation of floating debris is trapped in the currents of the North Pacific. The unspecific, yet moldable character of plastic serves as a foundation to discuss the decomposition of binary logic. Echoing in the discourse of the Anthropocene, plastic can be perceived as a blank space that disrupts the temporal taxonomies of evolving and remaining, persistence and decay. The paper gives an outline to a speculative investigation on plastic in regard to the art project An Ecosystem of Excess (2014) by Pinar Yoldas. The project portrays a plastivore fauna oscillating between prognostics and phantasm, by envisioning posthuman organisms to emerge from the residues of consumer culture in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Conjoining laboratory order and the messiness of the currents in the North Pacific, the project provides for a distinct storytelling that encounters the scattered certainty of a human perspective while it sketches an alternative evolution.