For a week in October 2014, we partnered with Atlanta's Goat Farm Arts Center to transform a Dumpster into a radically different interface for social media.
Filled with more than 100 illuminated blocks inscribed with words and emoji, #Trashtag allowed passersby to craft a personal message and share it through the Dumpster's Twitter account. The installation transformed the trash container into an unexpectedly creative space that anyone could use to communicate with others. Strangers bonded over the hidden phrases they discovered nestled within the wall of words, and the experience invited them into an ongoing narrative about the disposability of modern messaging.
Navigating the social media landscape often means spending time with our personal devices instead of each other, collectively broadcasting billions of messages out to a vast sea of followers, friends, and lurkers. We use our fingertips to transmit bits and bytes across the world more readily than we use our bodies to transmit social energy across a room. Who, at some point, hasn't wondered if this rushing stream of ephemeral posts is leading us toward an island of social isolation rather than a true community of friends?
For one week in Atlanta, we explored a more public interface for social messaging. As part of Elevate 2014, a pop-up gallery sponsored by the city and curated by local arts organizations, we filled a Dumpster parked on a historic downtown street with more than a hundred blocks inscribed with words and emoji. These illuminated, magnetic boxes clung to the Dumpster's steel walls where people could easily rearrange them to craft their own expressive phrases. The installation, titled #Trashtag, invited the public to participate in a fun physical spectacle in the Fairlie-Poplar neighborhood, an area bustling with students and office workers during the day but quiet at night save for panhandlers and the homeless.
Elevate's theme, "Social City," inspired our studio to bring interactions with digital social media into real physical spaces. We transformed the trash container into a creative place that anyone—regardless of title, social capital, or technical ability—could use to speak to others. We made "posting" a tangible task, a public activity, and a collective performance.
#Trashtag created a digital spectacle as well. The Dumpster's own Twitter feed, @TrashtagATL, preserves a partial record of people's interactions. If participants chose to compose their message on a special frame inside the Dumpster and press an oversized button, the Dumpster tweeted their phrase. Just as its interior became a canvas for magnetic poetry, its persona became a mouthpiece for the ongoing conversations taking place within its walls.
Often used to collect trash accumulated during building renovations, Dumpsters represent change and transformation. #Trashtag was a life-sized, accessible, and tangible interface that highlighted the disposability of modern messaging. It outlined a social media landscape rooted on a city street where sentiments could be tossed out and discarded as quickly as the pieces could be salvaged to create something new. Over the course of the week, strangers laughed together as they discovered hidden phrases nestled within a wall of words or assembled by accident in a pile of rejected blocks.
The #Trashtag Dumpster tweeted more than 200 posts, while people littered social media with tagged Instagram photos, Facebook posts, retweets and direct messages of their own. The digital chatter amplified the creative acts that took place in real time and space. People's work transformed bits of trash into messages of hope, desire, humor, and criticism. The words were there for them to find. All they had to do was reach out and grab them.
