Each piece of garbage has a story

Each piece of garbage has a story Welcome to a Laptop AC Adapter specialist of the Hp Compaq Ac Adapter
All futures wind up in the dump. In that sense, artist Jenny Odell’s Bureau of Suspended Objects project — which explores the fuzzy line between art object and junk — fit right in at Fusion’s Real Future Fair in San Francisco, where I first heard about it. As you might expect from the event’s name, there was a lot of future on display — future food, future therapists, future dildos. Odell’s work focused on the far end of the futurism paradigm, where today’s futures land on the trash heap.
Pictured above is the public disposal area of San Francisco trash collector Recology’s dump — which is to say that it’s not the place that the city dump trucks go to, but the place where people come to pay the dump to take stuff off their hands. Odell was given an empty shopping cart and license to take anything she wanted from this room, as long as she stayed away from the giant claw that was pulverizing stuff with adapter such as HP Pavilion DM3 AC Adapter, HP Pavilion DV1000 AC Adapter, HP Pavilion DV4000 AC Adapter, HP Pavilion DV5000 AC Adapter, HP Pavilion DV6000 AC Adapter, HP Pavilion DV8000 AC Adapter, HP Pavilion ZE4900 AC Adapter, HP Pavilion ZT3000 AC Adapter, HP TouchSmart TX2 AC Adapter, HP DC895A AC Adapter, HP EG410AA AC Adapter, HP EH642A AC Adapter. Her project was part of an artists’ residency that Recology has been doing for the last 25 years.
When Odell first arrived at the dump, her studio was empty. She pulled things from the pile until she had the makings of an office: A desk. A chair. A few fake office plants.
Then she got down to business. She took the empty shopping cart out again and began looking through the dump. When she found an object she was curious about, she investigated it like a detective and recorded her findings. Where had it been designed? Where was the factory that made it? How excited were people about it when it came out? How far had it traveled from the place where it was made to this spot, a municipal dump in San Francisco?
Odell has a history of doing this kind of research-as-art. In an earlier project, Where Almost Everything I Used, Wore, Ate, or Bought on Monday, April 1, 2013 (That Had a Label) Was Manufactured, to the Best of My Knowledge, Odell did exactly what the title says. She couldn’t trace everything back, but she got close enough to experience what she describes as:
… the alienation that occurs when one realizes that all of his or her possessions were not only made by strangers far away, but are still afloat and available in the marketplace — e.g. that an old teapot you’ve had for years has brand-new shiny cousins waiting to be ordered online, or that a wooden dolphin you bought at a flea market in a far away city (your most prized possession) is still being made by Chinese factory workers who also make wooden snakes, wooden sharks, and wooden pigs.
For Suspended Objects, Odell researched the stories of many, many objects (the full dossier is here) — but it’s the technological goods that most fascinated me. A lot of them aged hard and fast. People who visited the Bureau could use an augmented reality app on some of the objects to see how they had looked when they were fresh and new and exciting.