Burn(ing)(ed) Project
Project introduction
Burn(ing)(ed) is a project generated from a collection of cigarette butts. This project records and displays the various details of the burning of the cigarette itself and the form of the smoke created by it. Through time-lapse photography, it shows the burning process of a cigarette and encourages viewers to enter this microscopic world along with it. As another part of this project, there is also an art book composed of pictures of 80 cigarette butts printed on translucent paper, allowing viewers to have closer contact with the data. Also, This is my first time using the vinyl cutter, I chose to play with the type and manipulated all the data into the form of falling cigarette ash piled up on the surface of the stool(?).
Studies have shown that, on average, a cigarette will cause a person to lose 11 minutes of life. Excluding the record of the form, this project converts the remaining length of the cigarette into the length of life I lost for each cigarette alone and the total during this time. And this is simply imagining, creating, and expressing of data.
Initial Collection and Idea
This project all started from a habit of mine, I find myself simply do not want to throw all the cigarette butts away and I’ve been collecting them thinking one day, I need to make something out of them. After James presented this new Observe + Quantity project to us, I know it’s time for me to actually do it.
Cigarette butts are something people won’t be thinking about collecting, I understand they are gross and useless in a way, so the destiny of a cigarette butt is to be thrown in the trash or on the ground. But maybe only for me, the form of a burned cigarette and the variety of graphic elements on them are striking.
In the first week of this project, in a conversation between me and Chuck, I acknowledged that there are studies show that with every cigarette, a person would lose a certain time of their life. I immediately thought about there would be something interesting in that study and it could be the base of my project.
I found out that in a study from the University of Bristol, their conclusion is that One cigarette reduces your life by 11 minutes.
Progress photo
I first build a photo box with shipping box and filmed the video.
Here are some result screenshot.
