There is no real reason why chewing gum in its modern form should exist at all. At the time it was invented it served no purpose beyond the satisfaction derived from purchasing and owning an object (albeit briefly), and the pleasure to be had in exercising one&rsquo;s lower jaw. Any functionality that is now ascribed to modern day chewing gum has been grafted onto it since its first appearance 120-odd years ago.Apparently cursed with a lot that plumbs the depths of banality &ndash; there can be few fates less appealing than being placed in the mouth to be masticated into tastelessness before being spat out &ndash; chewing gum has somehow achieved iconic status. The frivolous nature of its existence, its record as one of the first mass-produced products of the twentieth century, and its standing as the epitome of inbuilt obsolescence have assured its place as a poster boy for the consumer culture of the developed world. It was not always thus. The first chewing gum was extremely practical in nature. Archaeologists working in Sweden and Finland have discovered pieces of birch bark tar imprinted with human tooth marks made over 5000 years ago. Our Neolithic ancestors are believed to have chewed the medicinal tar as a way of warding off tooth ache and sore throats. Since then, there have been many resins, grasses and other plants made into some form of gum so that their healing properties might be released into the body. However, it was the American Indian habit of chomping on a resin derived from the sap of spruce trees that paved the way for chewing gum as we know it. Settlers in New England began to mimic the practice to such large numbers that one John Baker Curtis began to market strips of his home-made &lsquo;Curtis&rsquo;s State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum&rsquo; for two a penny in 1848. So successful was the product that he was able to build the world&rsquo;s first chewing gum factory four years later. However, for all its antiseptic qualities, spruce gum did not have an appealing flavour and Curtis soon moved over to the production of gum made from paraffin wax whose own less than thrilling taste was masked by the addition of vanilla or liquorice. The development of chewing gum might have stopped right there had it not been for a 1869 meeting in New York between exiled former president of Mexico, General Santa Anna &ndash; Davie Crockett&rsquo;s victor at the Alamo &ndash; and compulsive inventor Thomas Adams. Santa Anna was keen to raise money to fund an unlikely armed insurrection against the Mexican government by promoting chicle &ndash; a latex tapped from the chicozapote tree &ndash; as a cheap substitute for rubber in the manufacture of car tyres.After months of failed attempts to create a chicle rubber suitable for the motor industry, Adams and Santa Anna gave up on the enterprise. It was only when the former witnessed a young girl buying a pennyworth of paraffin wax gum (which the shop owner described to him as &lsquo;pretty poor&rsquo;) that he hit upon the idea of experimenting with chicle as a chewing gum. He came up with a putty-like material that could be rolled into a ball in the mouth and, by February 1871, launched it in a single shop in New Jersey. It was tasteless and had no health-giving properties but it was recognisable as chewing gum and since it was better than the wax chewing gum on offer, people bought it. It was sold by the stick as &lsquo;Adams New York No.1 &ndash; Snapping and Stretching&rsquo;. A picture on the box showed City Hall, an instantly recognisable building in America&rsquo;s most exciting city. Chewing gum had taken the first step in its long journey of appropriation of celebrity as a marketing tool.Adams and other entrepreneurs were soon adding flavours to the gum to make it more appealing. Early experiments saw the inclusion of sassafras root bark, liquorice (again) and tolu, an ingredient then used in cough syrup, a move that gave back to chewing gum its original medicinal function. Pliant experts were soon on hand to recommend the use of gum to relieve thirst, freshen breath, calm nerves, ease sore throats and quicken the appetite. Competition from other brands spurred Adams to advertise on huge billboards on Broadway, bringing gum into the public space and consciousness as never before. William Wrigley went one better, erecting a line of 117 billboards along a New Jersey railway track on his way to becoming the United States&rsquo; largest purchaser of advertising.Since chewing gum was a product essentially without a purpose it acted as a blank page onto which manufacturers painted the fantasies of consumers. A brand called Kis-Me played on the sexual appeal of placing something in one&rsquo;s mouth. William White, the first man to market a mint gum, was also the first to make a link in the minds of potential customers between the chewing of gum and fame, fortune and success. In 1898 he began to get his gum into the mouths of the beautiful people, even managing to foist a stick on the future Edward VII whilst on a trip to England. The ploy was to be expanded later by the mass theft by the industry of an idea used by bubble gum makers: the issuing of free cards depicting movie stars, baseball players, national heroes and prominent millionaires.Gum first crossed the Atlantic in large quantities in World War I when more than four million packs were sent to troops by the American Red Cross. However, it was the GIs based in the UK in World War II who turned Britons on to chewing gum in huge numbers. It has since crossed the globe so that today there are over 500 companies making chewing gum in 93 countries (though, famously, the substance is banned in hyper-neat and tidy Singapore &ndash; those caught smuggling it in face a 12-month prison sentence). Chicle is almost a thing of the past, however, since almost all chewing gum is now made from synthetic substances such as vinyl resins or microcrystalline waxes.The relative cheapness and easy portability of gum has contributed to its use becoming routine for large swathes of the world&rsquo;s population. As a source of displacement activity and instant gratification it has only the cigarette to rival it. However, despite chewing gum&rsquo;s acceptance into mainstream culture and its tooth-whitening, breath-freshening image, there&rsquo;s still something about it that suggests its home is on the wrong side of the tracks. Mix some surly body language with a slow deliberate chew and gum becomes a vehicle to express aggression and rebellion. This perhaps goes some way to explaining its popularity amongst successive generations of the young.More surprisingly, once used, chewing gum is capable of its own feats of artistic self expression. Unlike its inert uniform pre-masticated state, used gum is uniquely shaped by the mouth of the individual who chewed it. Spurned by the user, it then takes its revenge wherever it is discarded, clinging limpet-like on pavements, park benches or Lonny Donegan&rsquo;s bedpost. It punishes the species that created its all but meaningless existence by inflicting upon it its inherent ugliness. More potently still, it remains poised and ready, day and night, to stick to any careless shoe, hand or even backside with which it comes into contact. In 5000 years, archaeologists will find it and will make a pronouncement about our era that we may not wish to hear.

There is no real reason why chewing gum in its modern form should exist at all. At the time it was invented it served no purpose beyond the satisfaction derived from purchasing and owning an object (albeit briefly), and the pleasure to be had in exercising one’s lower jaw. Any functionality that is now ascribed to modern day chewing gum has been grafted onto it since its first appearance 120-odd years ago.

Chewing Gum

There is perhaps no meal so quintessentially British as fish and chips. Leaving aside the competing claims of the traditional Sunday roast &ndash; and the fact that the method of preparing chipped fried potatoes is generally acknowledged to have been imported from France or Belgium &ndash; the fish and chip supper has become as much a symbol of Britishness as the Routemaster bus or the (now all but mythical) bowler-hatted city gent.That is not to say that the dish has been with us since the dawn of Albion. Indeed, it is only known to have been eaten in Britain since the latter half of the nineteenth century &ndash; Charles Dickens makes passing references in Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities &ndash; when it became a hit with poorer sectors of society. The nation&rsquo;s fishing fleet had taken to using trawling rather than line methods, resulting in a far greater catch and a consequent lowering in the cost of fish. When combined (around 1870), with the plentiful and inexpensive potato, a meal was created that became the treat of choice for the working classes. By the 1930s &ndash; when fish and chips were at the peak of their popularity in Britain &ndash; the middle classes were also to be found in the queues outside chippies.It is not until comparatively recently &ndash; and then rather by accident &ndash; that the now familiar polystyrene chip tray and the wooden chip fork made their mark on this dish-cum-institution. The chip tray owes its very existence in large part to the unstable properties of printers ink coupled with a certain squeamishness with regard to standards of food hygiene. From its inception, fish and chips had been wrapped in the cheapest form of packaging available: yesterday&rsquo;s newspapers. However, in the 1970s and 80s, the owners of newspapers began to experiment with new types of ink. Although these were cheaper, it was discovered that they were also more susceptible to transferring themselves onto the fingers of readers. When the ink came into contact with hot batter and a liberal dose of vinegar, it leapt off the page faster than headlines themselves. However, contrary to popular belief, there has never been an Act of Parliament banning the use of newspaper as a wrapping for fish and chips. It was environmental health inspectors who took a dim view of this unwelcome new condiment and began to apply pressure on fish and chip shops to discontinue their use of newspapers.There are several reasons why many chip shop owners sought found a solution in the polystyrene chip tray. They cost less than a couple of pence each, they are feather light and stackable, and they help assistants gauge the correct size of a portion of chips.However, to say that the chip tray has been taken to the hearts of the public would be to overstate the esteem in which it is held by some margin. Above all else, it suffers from being a very dull object visually. Trays per se are functional articles, a flat surface, usually an oblong, with a raised edge all round. Their simplicity has left them largely impervious to radical changes of design and the chip tray has not bucked the trend. Its all over brilliant whiteness does not help its cause either. Perhaps if all chip trays were post box red or covered in yellow and black stripes or had some other markings that characterised them as chip trays and nothing else, they might establish some sort of tradition and we thus might muster some affection for them. As it is, the overwhelming majority of them are merely the default colour shared by every other object made of expanded polystyrene.This genericism is mirrored by the chip tray&rsquo;s function. Despite its name, it can be found in numerous other outlets conveying a range of completely different fast foods to consumers. This compounds the lack of sense of the chip tray being special in any way. Not only is it a banal lifeless thing in the fish and chips world, it repeats its bland uniform monotony wherever else it appears. Understandably, this lends it a feel of the corporate, which does not sit well with the independent spirit of fish and chip shops, the vast majority of which are individually owned, Harry Ramsden&rsquo;s chain notwithstanding.Even the fact that the use of such trays spares the hands of consumers from the burns and vinegar seepage that traditional newspaper wrapping was wont to subject them to is outweighed by the argument that the added protection they afford sanitises and thus diminishes the whole fish and chips experience.If this were not enough, chip trays are fast on their way to joining supermarket plastic bags as the anti-eco-warriors of our times (and, unlike the bags, customers have no option of refusing them). Until recently, they were a source of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC). A very small proportion of them are recyclable. The vast majority are not biodegradable either (biodegradable trays are more expensive and so tend only to be used by chips shops attempting to promote themselves as eco-friendly). Unlike plastic drinks bottles, which biodegrade in five to ten years, or fellow litter icon chewing gum (25 years), polystyrene chip trays will be still be polystyrene chip trays on the day the universe finally collapses in on itself.Since the chip tray&rsquo;s useful life extends only for the length of time it takes for a person to eat the food it contains, and that typically that period ends when the consumer is outside, it is no surprise that it has become the archetype of British litter. If a television drama requires a shorthand means of expressing urban grit or rural squalor all that needs be done is to scatter a few used chip trays around the place.For the sake of authenticity, a number of miniature wooden forks would have to be sedulously strewn around too. In common with the chip tray, the chip fork is a relative newcomer and has found itself just as likely to turn into litter the instant its raison d&rsquo;&ecirc;tre has been exhausted. One could almost argue that, since they are typically bought from wholesalers in job lots of 20,000 at a cost of less than a halfpenny each, chip forks are produced for the express purpose of being thrown away and that the ten-minute period in which they are employed to shovel chips into a mouth is an aberration. As would be pieces of art these are not so much objets trouv&eacute;s as objets jet&eacute;s. At least it can be said that there is some aesthetic pleasure to be gained from them. The organic feel of the wood between the fingers complements the texture of the paper wrap held in the other hand. The chip fork&rsquo;s sinuous curves, rounded handle and aggressively slanted tines give it the appearance of a Weeble crossed with an angry tadpole. Flipped sideways, however, and it all but disappears, prefiguring its own ineluctable disappearance into the cracks, crevices and fissures of the street, the Bic pen of the pavement. Perhaps, in the end, its most important function is as a delineator of humans beings: after all, what sort of people buy a portion of chips and then imagine themselves too precious to eat them with their fingers?

There is perhaps no meal so quintessentially British as fish and chips. Leaving aside the competing claims of the traditional Sunday roast – and the fact that the method of preparing chipped fried potatoes is generally acknowledged to have been imported from France or Belgium – the fish and chip supper has become as much a symbol of Britishness as the Routemaster bus or the (now all but mythical) bowler-hatted city gent.

Chip Trays And Chip Forks

Some people think he is, but I disagree. I think he’s more like Hans Gruber, the German terrorist who takes over Nakatomi Towers in Die Hard.

Let me explain.

Mr. Turk is certainly a copycat. This is a well known fact, and indeed, a reason people are drawn to his work. The way he deals with concepts such as authorship and originality resonate with us, and for good reason.

Most of us are common thieves.

Every day each of us break copyright laws many times, without even realizing. If you photocopy a page from a book, take a picture of a work of art you didn’t produce, sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in public or forward an email you didn’t write, you’re guilty.

Our ideas about property rights, intellectual or otherwise, are generally viewed as good for society. Most of the time, they are. The problem is our laws pertaining to intellectual property are no longer sophisticated enough to deal with the ways we use information in the real world.

A law professor named John Tehranian from The University of Utah recently conducted an experiment that proves this. He made a note of every time he inadvertently broke copyright law and then worked out how much he would owe if he was sued each time this happened. He calculated that he would owe an average of $12.45 million a day. If we take Tehranian to be an average law abiding citizen, then the average law-abiding citizen is currently ringing up $4.5 billion a year in copyright violations.

Of course, the majority of us don’t get sued for these heinous crimes we commit daily, because these laws are ridiculous and unworkable, and most acts of copyright infringement are entirely harmless. The crimes are ignored and we go unpunished. But we’re still common thieves on paper. This huge crevasse between law and reality appeared because two things happened.

First our technology changed. When these laws were written, information used to flow in one direction. Producers produced, consumers consumed. There was a clear line between broadcaster and receiver, artist and fan, creator and pirate. But today that line is just a blur. Information now moves in many directions at once. Anybody can produce, rebroadcast or remix information of all kinds. Consumers can talk back in a variety of ways. They can form angry mobs or fan clubs - the fate of producers is in their hands. There is a power shift going on.

Secondly, all this new technology amplified one of our oldest behavioural traits; copying. Copying is part of the human condition. It is the backbone of our culture. It is how we learn to talk. It is how we learn social norms and manners. We are, all of us, relentless copying machines. And now we have access to the internet, the most advanced copying machine we’ve ever created.

The big problem is that our laws are not written with the behaviour of billions of human copying machines in mind. We common thieves don’t spend large amounts of time and money coercing governments to make sure copyright laws suit our behaviour. But large multinational media companies do. The result is a set of rules that serve their needs, but don’t work quite as well for everyone else.

But the lot of the common thief is worth defending. Families shouldn’t be receiving takedown notices from record labels for posting home movies up on YouTube of their kids dancing to copyright protected music. Companies shouldn’t be able to use copyright law to stifle free speech and stop information that makes them look bad from reaching the general public. Entertainment conglomerates shouldn’t be allowed to upload damaging spyware onto your computer without asking you, just to make sure you’re not stealing any of their content. Telecoms companies should not be given the power to decide what information you do and don’t see online. If the disconnect between law and reality is not addressed, our freedoms will be eroded.

It takes a different kind of thief to defend such freedoms. It takes artists like Turk publicly questioning who owns what. We need pirates that speak truth to power in order for things to change. Without the outcast at the outer marker moving the boundaries, everything stagnates. Ideas capable of making society better, fairer or more democratic are always resisted by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. We need people who innovate without asking permission.

Some of the greatest innovators in history were thought of as common thieves when they started out. When Thomas Edison invented the phonographic record player, musicians branded him a pirate out to steal their work and destroy the live music business, until a system was worked out so everyone could be paid royalties. We now call this system the recording industry.

Edison went on to invent film making, and wanted to charge a license fee to every film maker using his invention. Several New York film makers, including a young man named William, disagreed with this policy, and fled to the then still Wild West coast where they could make films illegally away from Edison’s team of lawyers, and flee to nearby Mexico if said lawyers were dispatched. This town of pirate filmmakers is still there today, it’s called Hollywood. William’s second name was Fox.

Today these industrial monoliths established by pirates are locked in fierce battles with us common thieves to protect their intellectual property rights. But when throwing lawsuits at your fans suddenly becomes an important part of your business model, you no longer have a business model.

When information flowed in one direction, it was easy to take culture and attach it to a product in order to sell it. Those on the edges of society created meaning, and then the commercial world stole it. But now the outsiders are finding ways to take meaning back from the market. People are organizing without organizations. Loose-knit networks and open source structures are proving to be more effective at doing some things than governments and markets. As a result we’re rebelling in new ways. Warhol famously said that “good business is the best art.” Culture used to be one of the only ways of rebelling in a non-violent manner, but today we can kill bad ideas with new business models.

It already seems like bad ideas and old power structures are being brought to the slaughter on a daily basis, and the revolution hasn’t even started yet. The future promises even more unfettered access to information and intellectual property. In May of 2008, a Professor named Adrian Bowyer at the University of Bath created the world’s first 3-D printing machine that can print out a copy of itself. The internet may be the world’s ultimate copying machine at the moment, but that was just Act One.

Act Two promises even greater levels of conflict. The war over intellectual property is going to get weird. But this movie has a happy ending. The truth is this new reality is good news for creators and copyright holders large and small - it’s just taking a while to figure out the details.

The future promises unlimited opportunities to create, reach audiences, gain notoriety, earn money and all the rest of it, if we can only reconcile the two conflicting forces at work when we have a new idea. At the same time as we are thinking “how can I get this out there?” we’re also asking ourselves “how can I benefit from/monetize this idea?” We want to spread ideas as information, but capitalize on them as intellectual property.

Which brings me to Die Hard.

Just before 20th Century Fox released the fourth Die Hard film in 2007, the marketing team at Fox had only one question: How do we get people excited about the Die Hard films again online?

They didn’t know a comedy rock band named Guyz Nite had just uploaded their new video for their song entitled Die Hard, to YouTube. The verses of the song outlined the plots of the first three Die Hard set to a sequence of tightly edited clips from the movies. It was hilarious enough for millions of people to watch it and tell their friends about it.

The legal team at Fox found out about the copyright violating video. They did their jobs, and asked YouTube to take down the infringing material. And YouTube did. End of story.

Except it wasn’t. When the marketing team at Fox found out about the video, and the millions of people getting excited about the Die Hard franchise again because of it, they called Guyz Nite. They had only one question: How much do we have to pay you to put that video you made up on YouTube?

It all worked out in the end – copyright laws were ignored in favour of user-generated content that helped everybody out. The band even got an invite to the New York premiere of the film. Pirates can reach the places other advertisers cannot reach. It’s like Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

This period of corporate cognitive dissonance we are experiencing will continue for some time. But unreasonable and outdated notions about intellectual property will eventually become history, if enough of us strive to be more than just common thieves.

Towards the end of Die Hard, Holly McClane says to Hans Gruber, “After all your posturing, all your speeches...you're nothing but a common thief.”

Hans replies, “I'm an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane.”

Some people think he is, but I disagree. I think he’s more like Hans Gruber, the German terrorist who takes over Nakatomi Towers in Die Hard. Let me explain. Mr. Turk is certainly a copycat. This is a well known fact, and indeed, a reason people are drawn to his work. The way he deals with concepts such as authorship and originality resonate with us, and for good reason. Most of us are common thieves.

Gavin Turk Is Not A Common Thief

&ldquo;Do not touch&rdquo; must be one the first thing anyone learns inside a museum. So much so that the museum is where one is likely to first get acquainted with the fact that there are some things in this world that are meant to be looked at but that can not be engaged with in any other way. It's a favorite pastime of mine to see how long it takes for someone to run up to me or yelp as soon as I extend a hand towards anything that hangs on a wall or sits on a plinth. I never aim to damage anything of course and I rarely actually do touch a piece, but I just want to determine how aggressively touch is evacuated out of the experience of the museum as I believe it is indicative of the degree of seriousness with which a culture defends its boundaries. In certain Italian and Greek museums, I've been known to lay a furtive yet respectful hand on a marble foot or a copper head for long uninterrupted minutes. In Britain and America, I have yet to touch as much as a velvet rope without dire consequences. Regardless of my location in the world, the objects in glass vitrines are always the ones I wish I could handle the most. There is something about the vitrine that almost taunts me. For some reason, the encased objects appear more precious and more interesting specifically because they can be seen but they can only be handled by the precious few who hold the appropriate authority and set of keys.Although it is now taken for granted that museum collections are not meant to be touched, this has not always been the case. There was a time when a visit to the museum was not ruled by vision but involved a lot of touching and handling. Indeed, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nascent European institutions didn&rsquo;t have the set of rules that we are now so familiar with. At the time, touching was considered to be an integral part of the museum visit and the whole experience had more in common with visiting an acquaintance kind enough to give a detailed tour of their home. Writes Constance Classen in her essay &ldquo;Touch In The Museum&rdquo; in &ldquo;The Book Of Touch&rdquo;;&ldquo;The curator, as gracious host, was expected to provide information about the collection and to offer it up to be touched. The museum visitors, as polite guests, were expected to show their interest and goodwill by asking questions and by touching the proffered objects.&rdquo; By allowing visitors to touch the collection, the curators were merely following rules of hospitality. It is perhaps pertinent to observe that the museum audience of that time was by no means comparable to, say, the visitors that one would now find on a rainy Sunday afternoon at the National Gallery or at Tate Modern. This experience was made possible mostly because fewer people frequented such institutions and because conservation had not yet evolved into the paranoid science of degradation that we know today.During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain, museums became involved in a national effort to educate and civilize the masses migrating to urban centres in order to take advantage of the plentiful work opportunities brought about by industrialisation. It was believed that museums would be a great alternative to less reputable establishments for workers to while away their newly found leisure time. This consecutively led to a greater number of visitors but also an audience that was not educated in ways of the museum. Museums responded with the imposition of order and rules. No longer were the objects displayed there available for touch but quite the opposite. They were now regarded as sacred and removed from ordinary human interaction. In turn, this increased reverence brought about heightened concern about potential damage to the collection accompanied by intensified programmes of conservation. By increasing visibility with better lighting and modes of display, modern museums aimed to promote visual access while discouraging any perceived need for touch. Gradually, the picking up and handling of objects gave way to a public space meant to structure an historical and distancing space between the audience and the objects. Barriers or cords were introduced in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a response to the increased interest in exhibitions and they became a familiar feature of picture galleries in the course of the nineteenth century. Writes Robert D.Altick in &ldquo;The Shows of London&rdquo;;&ldquo;In the 1820s in Britain barriers were introduced to keep the expanding middle class audiences at a safe distance. In particular large paintings depicting contemporary events had to be railed off, such as David Wilkie&rsquo;s Chelsea Pensioners Receiving the Gazette Announcing the Battle of Waterloo (1822), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1822.&rdquo;These obstructions were meant to increase the distance between the spectator and the work of art as a way to make the works of art more accessible to a greater number of people. They also meant that the engagement with artefacts and works of art was becoming more visual and less kinaesthetic. Glass vitrines acted in a similar way to railings but pushed the distancing process a little further by blocking access in every way but visually. They also allowed for groupings of small objects from a similar historical period or of a similar school or form, especially the ones made of the most fragile organic materials such as ivory, bone, fabric and wood. Handling of such objects has been known to cause infinitesimal damage such as traces of moisture or grease which can culminate over time in the object&rsquo;s destruction. Certain restored works composed of separate parts, veneering or inlaid elements will most often also go behind glass. Today, museums find themselves in the specific predicament of having to protect things that may be damaged by touch while granting the widest possible access. Although for many people, significant engagement with an object is most likely to happen via touch or some form of manipulation, the museum with its tantalising arrays of glass vitrines and velvet cords will always provide temptation.

“Do not touch” must be one the first thing anyone learns inside a museum. So much so that the museum is where one is likely to first get acquainted with the fact that there are some things in this world that are meant to be looked at but that can not be engaged with in any other way. It's a favorite pastime of mine to see how long it takes for someone to run up to me or yelp as soon as I extend a hand towards anything that hangs on a wall or sits on a plinth.

Museum Vitrines

There are a few things in this world that simply demand to be fiddled with. Once these mundane objects have served their purpose, they are free to be appropriated via all kinds of operations that are usually carried out absentmindedly as their porous surface easily yields to teeth and nail imprints, ink doodlings and cigarette burns. This flexible material, as strong as certain metals, is in fact an aromatic polymer made from solidified liquid hydrocarbon. The type of polystyrene used specifically to make the familiar cups and packaging material is an expanded form produced by mixing a gaseous blowing agent into what would otherwise become the solid plastic that is regular polystyrene, often used in the making of CD cases and disposable cutlery. Its very texture and lightness contribute greatly to the pleasure derived from modifying them. Has anything precious ever been fashioned out polystyrene? It is very unlikely for the very reason that because it is so light and devoid of character, it feels inconsequential to poke and prod at it before unceremoniously disposing of it. As a disposable material though, it doesn't get much better as its cushiony consistency offers just enough resistance while allowing for a variety of marks from the deep to the superficial. It is also recognized as an efficient insulator, thus its frequent use as a container for hot liquids, but bear in mind that it is highly flammable if you are ever possessed by the urge to decorate your empty coffee cup with an open flame. Ironically for an object valued for its disposability, because expanded polystyrene takes on average up to 900 years to decompose, polystyrene cups that have been absent-mindedly sculpted and marked accidentally become works for posterity. With this in mind, if everybody treated the polystyrene as a respectable material on which to write, draw and engrave, perhaps the British Library could, in time, give up on the digitalisation of all its books and turn to the &ldquo;polystyrisation&rdquo; of its collections instead. Imagine sorting through stacks of cups instead of piles of books.

There are a few things in this world that simply demand to be fiddled with. Once these mundane objects have served their purpose, they are free to be appropriated via all kinds of operations that are usually carried out absentmindedly as their porous surface easily yields to teeth and nail imprints, ink doodlings and cigarette burns.

Chewing GumDixe Wills1 Jun 05

Chip Trays And Chip ForksDixe Wills1 Jun 05

Gavin Turk Is Not A Common ThiefMatt Mason1 Jun 05

Museum VitrinesMartine Rouleau1 Jun 05

Polystyrene CupsMartine Rouleau1 Jun 05