NEW YORK: Got something against other
people, but want to save the planet? Then chucking bottles at New York's
"Glassphemy!" installation is for you.
Throwing bottles into
recycling bins is not new, but throwing them at people at the same time
is.
Eco-minded artists in an area near Brooklyn's notoriously polluted
Gowanus Canal have set up a tower-shaped container made of bullet-proof glass
and metal frames that allows visitors to do just that.
Guests are
encouraged to stand on a high platform and hurl bottles down against the glass
wall. On the other side at a safe, but still shockingly close distance, stand
their friends, or enemies, trying not to flinch as the bottles rain down and
smash next to their faces. The bottles don't just explode, they set off flashing
lights controlled by sensors attached to the installation.
That's the
fun part. The serious part is that the broken glass slowly collects in the huge
container for
recycling. The artists behind the project call it a
"psychological recycling experiment".
"There was a panel in
Philadelphia. The architects were saying 'How can we motivate the people not to
go and smash things?'" recalled David Belt, head of the creators Macro
Sea.
"Someone in the audience said, 'Why not make a place where you
go and smash bottles?' So we tried to figure out a place where you can go and
smash bottles there, and recycle them onsite."
His wife, Belt said,
was the first to cast glass. "My wife through some bottles at me the other
night, a little too hard, but she felt much better afterwards," he said. "It is
all about purging your aggressiveness."
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