OTG MORGANTOWN
trashmag vol. 1
“I threw it on the ground.” -Andy Samberg
CONTENTS The Birth of OTG Editor’s Selection The Running Tally Trending Trash Tag Your Trash Trashy Whimsy OTG as Situationist Praxis Trash Music for Trash People Contemporaries in Compost
Written, Edited & Published by: Trevor Hager, Kree Campbell & Jackson Montgomery in October 2017 Trashmag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license.
THE BIRTH OF OTG “Late one night while walking home in fall of 2015, some friends and I happened upon a bag of some really shitty weed on the trail next to Ming Hsieh Hall. From then on, I began taking pictures of the strange things I found around the city. After several months of compiling photos, On The Ground Morgantown was launched on Twitter in February of 2016 as a crowdsourced record of Morgantown’s material throwaway culture. Every item told a story; a temporary record of a lost moment, with any trace of remnants likely to be swept, blown, picked up, or washed away and lost forever. In the almost two years since we began, we have posted over 600 of these moments, making them a permanent part of Morgantown’s unique history.” -Trevor
EDITOR’S SELECTION Our favorite submissions. VIDEO LINK
Fish ((Found near Pierpont. Submitted by @Lucas_enship)
Senator Shelley Moore Capito (Found on High St. Submitted by @jordanln97)
“This fish was reportedly two-feet long and fell from the heavens!” -Trevor
“LOL, what an absolute turdperson!” -Kree
Leftovers (Found on Spruce St. Submitted by @montbummery) “It looked like someone dumped their entire fridge! The largest food find to date.” -Jackson
THE RUNNING TALLY Underwear (socks, panties, bras)
shoes
food
Misc. clothing needles
sex stuff
hats
jewelry
dead stuff
kitchenware
doll legs
vampire teeth
bathroom supplies
pokemon cards
toys & parts
wigs & weaves
booze
TRENDING TRASH
Why certain things make more likely refuse. 1. Food
This one is easy - everyone eats. Townies, students, tourists, whatever. We’re pretty much all equally likely culprits to have left food On The Ground. And obviously, once food hits the ground most folks aren’t gonna bother trying to save it. The more mysterious side of the posts under this classification are the intact and/or uncompromised ingredients. Dropped snacks are a minor inconvenience, abandoned meals are a tragedy.
2. Clothing, specifically underwear
Panties, bras, and boxers make up the bulk of attire spotted in the wilds of Morgantown. Panties, top overall clothing submission, are presumably /intentionally/ ditched. There’s a detached kind of voyeurism to see the remnants of a late night rendezvous and knowing that someone, somewhere was swept up in a moment of passion so urgent that it overrode that persons material attachment to 3/$21 PINK thong. Another possible panty-ditch scenario- discrete public urination with the underpants being sacrificed to be an in-a-pinch toilet paper.
3. Sexual Paraphrenalia
Condoms (both used and in wrapper), dildos, boner pills and more. Vast Majority of submissions in this category awre condoms still in the wrapper. Not very mysterious origins, likely they are ‘just in case’ condoms that have wiggled loose from their wallet or back pocket home. We here at OTG would like to remind you that condoms and lube are available for little to no cost from Health Right, Condom Caravan, Caritas House, and various locations around town.
4. Booze
Empty cans and bottles, half consumed drinks ditched to avoid fines for violating open container laws. There’s a reason we’re consistently ranked among the top party schools and that reason is semifunctional alcoholism. The townies are usually pretty sloshed too.
5. Dead Stuff
Roadkill, dead birds, random pieces of animals, a couple splatters that look suspiciously like human blood. As with eating or fucking, death is very natural and common part of existence. While we know death to be an intrinsic part of life, it can be jarring to be confronted by a lil reminder of one’s own mortality during a casual stroll.
TAG YOUR TRASH How to submit your trash to OTG: 1. Follow @OTG_Morgantown on Twitter! 2. Find some interesting garbage. Not just your everyday litter, but something a little out of the ordinary. Something that breaks your train of thought and forces you to focus on your surroundings for a second. 3. Snap a quality pic and DM it to us with the location. We’ll tag you in the post by default, but let us know if you want to be left anonymous! Got a video? Just tweet it out making sure to include the location and @OTG_Morgantown!
TRASHY WHIMSY or; The Uplifting Surreality of Things that are Not Where They’re Supposed To Be Think about your daily routine. You likely get up, shower, shit, shave, get dressed, and begrudgingly get mentally prepared to go to work or school or the methadone clinic (no judgement here btw) or whatever it is you do. Think about the route you take, the paved arteries through town that pulse with 9 to 5 traffic patterns. Most folks have at least some kind of routine that is so oft repeated that they practically go on autopilot and breeze through it. You’ve probably had hundreds and hundreds of days with no distinct memory attached to them. But... sometimes, on that well-trod path to your daily obligation, something is just a little different. Maybe something strange is On The Ground. Even in this disjointed, automatic state of being we slip into, our minds are constantly taking in and prioritizing the details of our surroundings, assessing any potential threats or obstacles so that we may act to avoid them as needed. In that prioritization process, we become slowly numbed to the things we see most frequently. That’s important! It’s good and healthy. Gosh, imagine noticing every detail around you all the time! Sounds E X H A U S T I N G. But when we scan our surroundings and see something new, something unexpected, our brains quickly flag it as Worth Noticing and attempt to rationalize the seemingly disjointed placement of this thing. As fast as our neurons can fire, we fill in a story. “That is a funny hat next to a punctured beer can. Someone was probably wearing a funny hat and shotgunned that beer.” The veracity of the quick dreamt scenario is largely unprovable and irrelevant because we are observing only the secondhand artifacts. These artifacts, and the stories we concoct about them, can take that unthinking routine and suddenly infuse it with a jolt of mystery. We project out own experiences onto what we observe. Maybe even squeeze some kind of metaphor from the find. Sometimes it isn’t what catches our eye that amuses us as much the story it tells. Spotting a weathered valentines teddy bear in mid-July could mean so many things! Who lost it? Do they mind that it’s gone? Perhaps it was lost in a move or thrown from a car window by an upset ex-lover? A funny bit of refuse reminds us that there are people around us everyday leaving these perplexities for us to find. We get small glimpses into the lives of others and until that trash is scooped up, everyone else who passes by can get a peek into that window of possibility as well. @OTG_Morgantown lives & breathes for unexpected moments like these. We want to share these trash treasures that hide in plain sight with everyone, we want to see the story-telling scraps that you find in town! `
OTG AS SITUATIONIST PRAXIS From 1957 to 1972, a group of avant-garde artists in France came together to formulate a new vision for future society. Drawing from their predecessors (surrealists, Dadaists, nihilists, absurdists, existentialists, psychoanalysts), but demanding a radical exclusion of outdated ideas and social practices, these cultural revolutionaries rapidly published a large body of work on their ideas. They imagined a world in which architecture would bend to the will of its inhabitants, making cities naturally conducive to playful exploration and completely eradicating banality and boredom from everyday life. Their ultimate goal? To reintegrate art into the totality of society, returning us all to a life of abundance and creativity, lived directly in the present moment. In 1953’s Formulary for a New Urbanism, Ivan Chtcheglov wrote “Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams.” Earlier in the passage, “One of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded will be the construction of situations,” arising out of the human need for total creation – the need to play with architecture, time, and space. Thus, the Situationist International began its mission to change the world. The new cities Chtcheglov envisioned would be carefully crafted so as to naturally facilitate the activities taking place in their various districts, and the inhabitants’ movement throughout. For example, he wrote “The chamber of love will be more distant from the center of the city: it will naturally recreate for the partners a sense of exoticism in a locale less open to light, more hidden, so as to recover the atmosphere of secrecy.” This careful study of a space’s effect on human emotion and behavior became a key practice of the situationists, eventually solidifying into the field of psychogeography. “Cities have psychogeographical contours,” wrote Guy Debord in 1958’s Theory of the Dérive, “with
constant currents, fixed points, and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into, or exit from certain zones.” The dérive, as Debord described it, is “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences,” involving “playful constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects.” Basically, wandering about a section of a city with the company of a couple like-minded adventurers and making note of those places that naturally draw the disoriented traveler: hidden vantage points, forgotten landmarks, back alley shortcuts, areas that feel welcoming or foreboding, etc. Once a thorough survey of a city has been made by corroborating data from multiple derives we can begin to envision how spaces may naturally develop in the future. Thus, we at OTG envision our own practice as an addition to the field of psychogeography. Searching for unusual trash and making note of its relation to the city and its occupants as a kind of dérive. In a country of spectacular indulgence, you can learn a lot about people by what they throw away.
TRASH MUSIC FOR TRASH PEOPLE Get fired up to go trash-hunting with this delightfully rotten selection of songs.
1. New York Dolls - Trash 2. The Cramps - Garbageman 3. Soda - New Trash 4. The Deviants - Garbage 5. Cherry Glazerr - Trash People 6. Rubblebucket - On the Ground 7. John Prine & Iris DeMent Who’s Gonna Take the Garbage Out 8. AJJ - American Garbage 9. Aesop Rock - Garbage 10. Tyler, the Creator - Garbage 11. Sex Bob-Omb - Garbage Truck 12. Black Flag - Wasted
SPOTIFY LINK
CONTEMPORARIES IN COMPOST “Did anyone else sniff today’s garbage? And I thought yesterday’s garbage smelled good.” -Bobby Hill
Fountain Marcel Duchamp, 1917
Irma the Bearer Vik Muniz, 2008
Unnamed 18 Miina Äkkijyrkkä,
Duchamp pioneered the use of “readymades” in art - preexisting forms (often trash) that could be taken out of their normal context and introduced into a gallery setting.
In his “Pictures of Garbage” series, Muniz used trash as a medium to document the lives of Brazilian garbage-pickers who made their living off the world’s largest landfill in Jardim Gramacho.
This Finnish sculptor has been working with images of cows ever since she spent time on a dairy farm. Her nearly 20-foottall bovines are constructed out of recycled car parts.