the toaster project.
I’m Thomas Thwaites and I’m trying to build a toaster, from scratch - beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster.
Besides taking helicoptors to oil rigs to access oil to create plastic for the toaster, and other adventures with a microwave, the project has a story to tell..
The contrast in scale between between consumer products we use in the home and the industry that produces them is I think absurd – massive industrial activity devoted to making objects which enable us, the consumer, to toast bread more efficiently. These items betray no trace of their providence.
Still confused? Ok, so here is a student trying to create a product from scratch. A toaster. It could be a frying pan, a birdcage or a water heater if you prefer, but the idea was to create a product by avoiding the industrial chain, the distribution of labor, and all those little meaningful metaphysical narratives that you can extract from it.
More confused? This is what he means,
The difficulty of the task began to become clear. To obtain the iron ore, Thwaites had to travel to a former mine in Wales that now serves as a museum. His first attempt to smelt the iron using 15th-century technology failed dismally. His second attempt was something of a cheat, using a recently patented smelting method and a microwave oven – the microwave oven was a casualty of the process – to produce a coin-size lump of iron.
Further short cuts were to follow. Plastic comes from oil, but despite launching a charm offensive against BP, he never did make it out to an oil rig. His attempts to make plastic from potato starch were foiled by hungry snails. He settled for scavenging plastic from a local dump, melting it and moulding it into a toaster casing.
Watch this for example, where he tried to extract iron ore using a microwave. Kids, maybe you could try this at home.
Here is the project website, and here, here and here are some articles pointing to it.
