MetaFilter posts tagged with reuse

Reuse, Recycle, and ROCK

ocherdraco — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:07:59 -0800

Electric Junkyard Gamelan is the brainchild of bandleader and composer Terry Dame, and fuses Dame's passions of composing, inventing and building. Originally inspired by traditional Gamelan music from Bali, the group recycles and repurposes everyday objects into musical instruments. While some of their songs do indeed resemble the hypnotic percussive melodies of a Balinese/Javanese gamelan orchestra (The Nutbutter Challenge), other tunes strike out into new, distinctly urban American directions (Ode to Fred Beans). Following the band's motto, "Reuse, Recycle and ROCK," instruments are fashioned from coat hangers and rubber bands, bed frames, old farm equipment, turntable platters, clay pots, saw blades and truck springs. The "Big Barp" rubber-band harp makes a particularly unusual sound. Watching the band play is a fundamental part of enjoying their music:

At the Cleveland Bridge Project (Part 2, Part 3)
"Cark Nogg" and "Big Barp" in Baltimore at the Metro Gallery
At the Chicago World Music Festival in Daley Plaza

Brooklyn Independent Television interviewed the band, with lots of great description about how they play; there's another great interview (with lots of great music) with David Garland on WNYC's Spinning on Air (where I first heard of the band). You can find photos of the band on Flickr to get a closer look at their instruments. Electric Junkyard Gamelan has three albums (Life on Marz, Live from HERE, and the self-titled Electric Junkyard Gamelan). Live in New York? They're performing tonight at Joe's Pub. Sources for the descriptions in the main part of this post: EJG's about the band page, this post on Music for Maniacs, and yesterday's epsiode description at Spinning On Air.

Beating Swords into Plowshares, Micronesian-Style

barnacles — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:34:15 -0800

The Pacific theatre of World War 2 left many traces behind. The shipwrecks of Chuuk Lagoon are probably the most famous, but they're hardly the primary reminders of former military action present in the day-to-day lives of many Micronesians. Besides the many large-scale remains of the war, such as abandoned airfields Quonset huts, and abandoned bunkers, many Micronesians live with recycled WW2 materials of a smaller kind. Marsden Matting is one of the most commonly seen pieces of WW2 materiel, and Marsden airstrips still exist. The materials have also found new life as walkways, construction materials, and, most often, as fencing (2). In the Marshall islands, Japanese military rice cookers have been turned into water catchments, and 127 mm ammunition boxes have been repurposed as water catchments, storage lockers, and copra driers. The scavenging of airplane parts is perhaps the zenith of Pacific war recycling. B-24s, in particular, presented a wealth of parts that found new peacetime purposes, such oxygen cylinders, propellors, and fuselage pieces. Even after the war, the US military was leaving behind items that the local people found useful: drop tanks from F-86s. For even more photos and text about Micronesian military recycling, check out this PDF (note: 7 MB).

A Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich of a Computer Case

filthy light thief — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:49:55 -0800

The use of cardboard for things other than packaging is not new to the blue, from detailed artwork to furnature (and even re-making the Tron light cycle scene), and now computer cases. Brenden Macaluso's design is not the first, with a Japanese design from 2005 (the original site is down, but Archive.org has a backup, with more versions archived), and other kludged fixes for an existing case missing parts. Recompute wasn't the only cardboard case in the 2009 Greener Gadgets design competition. The other was Cardboardcase, by Francesco Biasci and Martina Becattini, which is a more of a traditional computer case form. On the DIY side, Instructables provides plans for a DIY cardboard laptop case. Recompute is inspired by the amount of computer hardware being recycled at the end of the product's lifecycle. The video section of the related website has additional associated clips. According to an interview with Macaluso, the design wasn't initially limited to cardboard as a material, but as he researched the components he found that cardboard had some bonus features, such as a greater tolerance for heat (cardboard has a higher fire and ignition point -- 258°C and 427°C, respectively -- where plastics begin to melt at about 120°C - source), and the corrugation ventilates the entire structure. The processor has its own cooling fan built in and the power supply and mother board are isolated from each other to keep heat from one affecting the other (source).

Meubles en carton

clavicle — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:00:45 -0800

Cardboard furniture: cheap and convenient. Or astounding. How much weight can a piece of cardboard really bear? This guy (video in French) and these people can show you. They're cartonnistes -- who knew there were so many people building cardboard furniture in France that they have a word for it? Accomplished cartonniste Eric Guiomar founded the Compagnie Bleuzen, which gives occasional cardboard furniture workshops and sells an instructional DVD. You can also find him on YouTube and Instructables. Association Récréation, a group in Brest dedicated to making art from reused and recycled materials, has a blog of cardboard furniture made in its workshops. I love this coffee table: shaped like a nautilus shell with a little drawer at its mouth and covered in used coffee filters. How they do it: this Instructable from Guiomar shows internal struts inside a cylindrical cardboard stool, which seem to be the cartonnistes' preferred way to give their furniture structural integrity. Leo Kempf's approach is a little different; inspired by Frank Gehry's wiggle chair, he glues layers of identical cardboard cutouts together, sometimes with plywood spacers, to take advantage of the strength of the corrugation inside. Will Holman does a little of both. A little more pedestrian but still useful is this laptop stand, and I bet this collapsible cardboard futon is...well, at least as comfortable as a regular futon. (Previously, origami-style cardboard chairs for kids.)

Reuse

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:18:39 -0800

Computer Art

Excuse me, were you going to art that?

artifarce — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:47:56 -0800

Superuse: Reusing can be beautiful, unusual, functional, and even illustrative of our culture of excess. (all links lead to the same site).

what is trash to you might be treasure to another ...

grabbingsand — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 08:55:46 -0800

Freecycling. Reducing the amount of trash we generate by connecting people who have things that they no longer want with people who want those same things. The only rule: Every item posted must be free.