Plastic makes up grocery bags, cat toys, contraceptives, debit cards, hybrid cars, and our artificial limbs, otherwise known as phones. The flexible material is intimate. Though they range in intensity, plastic use, accumulation, and build-up cross geographic and economic conditions. Plastic is a universal plight, given its slow decomposition rate. The philosopher and historian of science Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent writes in her contribution to the 2013 collection Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic that the production of "plastic destroys the archives of life on earth.”¹ We can think of archives as what is preserved. So, plastic has become a fabric of ourselves and our environments. What stops us from unthreading our twenty-first-century lives from plastic? Echoing environmental thinker Heather Davis’s insightful essay “Life & Death in the Anthropocene” (from the 2015 collection Art in the Anthropocene), plastic is a symbol of modernity because it promises to erase the dirt and decay of the world.²

The Pandemic, our recent air crisis, has introduced a renaissance of plastic tents — spaces in which the dirt and decay of the environment are “erased.” These areas are supposedly free (or freer) of pollutants. But fear and suspicion can spread within these pop-up plastic habitats. We begin to be wary of the outside — the polluted air. Plastic habitats were not always pseudo-havens from infection, let alone commodified parts of a dystopian scene. Plastic was a sign of the future and the do-it-yourself mentality in the 1960s and 70s Bay Area countercultures. In the unclassified section of Domebook One, a 1970 how-to-guide on dome-building, an experimental art and design collective advertised their ethos for building plastic structures as “air buildings, nomadic visions.” The collective was known as Ant Farm. It was founded in 1968 and made up of a cohort of unconventional architects, including Chip Lord, Doug Michels, and Curtis Schreier. Think of an alternative newspaper or band, but for architecture. The visionary group realized habitable inflatables, often as performance pieces or to house artistic gatherings. The collective promoted a radical relationship to space in defiance of the Brutalist architecture of the Sixties.

How do we make sense of Ant Farm’s free-spirited inflatables with their use of plastic, a material with a destructive record? We do not. Should we not move away from hierarchies, including the one between “harmful” and “harmless”? Plasticity needs our attention. It is a resource, although human-made, that must collectively benefit instead of destroy. As of now, we have caused irrevocable damage — plastic is left to decompose for ages, left to accumulate in the (un)Great Pacific Garbage Patch, pushed over for vulnerable communities to fear. It is our obligation to share in the responsibility of the material. Plastic redefines what can be considered the “commons.” We must leave the pen-and-quill mindset of keeping the present as-is for future generations. Who are we to distinguish between past, present, and future? As we nurture a compost bin, let us nurture our plastic; let us not leave it as fuel for inequality and extraction.

Architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas’ 2002 essay “Junkspace” hands us a way to imagine co-living with inflatables (and by extension plastic) — temporary habitats erected out of polyethylene, that thin, disposable, transportable, and affordable plastic otherwise known as vinyl. Junkspace, according to Koolhaas, is the litter left behind by humans on our planet, the so-called “modern” twenty-first-century built space. Koolhaas, in his essay, attacks the contemporary architectural obsession with form and market demands, just as Ant Farm resisted large austere buildings. Instead of the suspicion and detachment from day-to-day earthly matters that our techno-utopianism (arguably) encourages, plastic habitats, although part of that human litter, promote a fluid and free relation to earth (as Ant Farm envisioned and realized).³ An inflatable, in its ability to change human behavior through plastic design, ushers in a reinvention of Junkspace that is not so trashy after all.

Koolhaas hauntingly writes that conditioned space becomes conditional space. “Conditioned” as in, yes, air conditioning. Air-conditioning is an invisible force. It cannot be perceived with our eyes, even while its presence is felt. It is difficult to grasp the synthetic filtered “air” completely. The Junkspaces of airports, shopping malls, highway systems, or office buildings are not separated, since unnatural air slithers through all of them — for Koolhaas, air-conditioning has ultimately created the “endless building.” And since air-conditioning is rather expensive and cannot be maintained in the long-run, all of this space eventually becomes Junkspace. Air-conditioned spaces are conditional. Are inflatables our saviors, freeing us from “conditional air”? According to Ant Farm’s widely distributed 1973 zine Inflatocookbook, to make an inflatable you need plastic sheets and tape, which are then supported by fans found at your local Goodwill or wholesaler. While for medium-sized inflatables Ant Farm recommended a “regular office fan,” gas-powered fans activated large inflatables. Plastic and gas — not exactly ecologically-conscious materials. But the collective was aware of this even when climate violence was not widely acknowledged by the public. Ant Farm wrote in their zine that using petroleum to construct inflatable shelters is still far better than burning it in an internal combustion engine.


Rather than a Junkspace permeated with chemicals and fillers, fans suggest only a subtle rearranging of air within an inflatable. Fan technologies have advanced slightly since Ant Farm’s creation of their zine, making way for the use of electric, battery, or even solar-powered fans inside inflatables today. And yet, a fan can only support a bubble for so long before it must be replaced; this was on par with the nomadic living and environmentalist spirit of Ant Farm. Inflatables will never be expected to be in one place for a long period of time. This element of portability goes against Junkspace. For Koolhaas, Junkspace does not age, or its aging is disastrous; for instance, department stores or nightclubs are often suddenly abandoned. Sections of Junkspace deteriorate and others upgrade, leaving a chaotic thriving and dying aesthetic. As opposed to structures made of brick and mortar, inflatables can close — cease to exist, as if they never made their mark in the first place. Inflatables are not “endless” like Junkspace. An inflatable with holes will be trashed. It cannot be repaired and upgraded like an urban airport. The space (or air) inside an inflatable depletes eventually. An inflatable exists or it does not. An inflatable does not clench onto the air it temporarily surrounds. This is different from the motel that shuts down one wing and renovates another, leaving a catastrophic space of old and new spatial decay.

Unlike Junkspace that piles stuff on top of stuff to create places to dwell, plastic habitats are not additive by nature. An inflatable is a bubble — it comes into being through an inflation of air. An inflatable rises from the ground up. It can be filled and de-filled to nothing. No section of the plastic will be left to rot in one place like the suburban bank that shuts down, leaving an expansion of literal and metaphorical cracks. And yet, after the inflatable’s deflation we are left with a dilemma. What do we do with the used plastic? Plastic is not necessarily additive, but it is accumulative. Davis writes in her essay that plastic “gathers in the environment in the form of blighted landscapes, bags fluttering in the wind, or lighters and wrappers found in ditches, masses of untold plastic items.”⁴ Plastic eventually no longer serves its value and is considered waste. The thing that protects you from the dirt and decay of the world becomes the dirt and decay.

What if we were to recycle inflatables? Ant farm writes that once an inflatable deflates, or once it is time to move to a new location, the best we can do is to reuse the vinyl. In the early 1970s recycling was just entering the collective American consciousness with the rise of the environmental movement. Art Farm wrote in their Inflatocookbook that it is possible to recycle poly, but it is a complex process and big manufacturers will not find it profitable. Even by today’s standards, Ant Farm was right. Progress, after all, is seldom linear. Plastic and recycling have always been about profit. Even while recycling poly is the best option — alternatives being to burn it or let the stubborn matter decompose — recycling is not utopian. In the 2005 publication Ethics of Waste, the environmental academic Gay Hawkins outlines a blunt case against the fascination with recycling, writing “Big deal! As if that's going to change the catastrophe of ecological destruction; the global trade in waste from north to south; the excesses of unregulated, dirty capitalist production; or the obscenity of overconsumption.”⁵

Leaving inflatable waste for the technocrats, industries, and corporations to manage is dystopian. “Dystopia” is a word whose roots come from the medical field, originally meaning “displacement of an organ.” Almost everyone on earth — human and nonhuman alike — has plastic chemicals flowing inside their bodies, as is outlined in a collection edited by Hawkins, titled Accumulation.⁶ The very nature of any matter is kinship and our lives are sewed into plastic. It would be violent (or dystopian) to rip the organ apart. Even if the current and future production of plastic ceased miraculously, the internal and external plastic in circulation would exist for generations to come. How can we learn to accept our coexistence with plastic within ecological, bodily, and ancestral relationships? Let us bring the invisibility of plastic waste to the surface. No more egotistical throwing of waste to areas with fewer regulations. Sustainability cannot be bought, despite popular misconception. Being surrounded by plastic is a lived experience. Coming to terms with it or not defines this predicament. To soften the pain of living in a world governed by plastic is to reclaim the otherwise horror-inducing fact.

Humor can be a way of calming anxiety about plastic suffocation. Ant Farm’s politically-charged 1970 performance at UC Berkeley gives us a satirical example and, surprisingly, a look into the future. The collective created a now eerily familiar conceptual scenario in which an inflatable was the only place you could breathe non-toxic air. Members of Ant Farm stood outside the bubble with gas masks, announcing an air emergency. The outside world was considered uninhabitable; their inflatable was the last habitable place on earth. Reading their subtext (or subperformance), inflatables are about playfulness and enjoyment, as opposed to the imprisoning modernist architecture which promotes rigidity for the dwellers of its space. As the architectural critic Michael Sorkin says in a trailer for the first documentary on Ant Farm, Space, Land, and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm, the collective’s members “were comedians. And I mean this in the highest form of compliment.”⁷ The seriousness of pollution was syncretized with scheming the public — a sort of shameless ironic soirée. Let us bring Ant Farm’s sensibility to today’s genuine environment of air pollution and microbe takeover. By “today” I do not mean our time of COVID-19 (to borrow from technocratic code), but rather, in the words of philosopher Achille Mbembe from his 2020 essay “The Universal Right to Breathe,” the ever-present condition of modernity: “caught in the stranglehold of injustice and inequality, much of humanity is threatened by a great chokehold.”⁸

Ant Farm’s toxic air performance brings to light the complexity of being born into a world that is both utopian and dystopian. Similar to “dystopia,” the word “utopia” has a curious history, deriving from a Proto-Indo-European root aiw-, meaning “vital force.” Inflatables bring out this very life-giving force. The word “inflate,” as in the Latin infinitive of inflare, means “to blow into,” or truly to “inspire.” An entry for the word “Inspiration” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics relates it to the concept of “sacred inspired poetics,” as in poetry “arriving from the outside, through external mystical forces,” instead of the inspiration coming from the poet’s own mind.⁹ An inflatable is not just able to blow up into a plastic structure; it arranges the air it surrounds; we can be inspired by the air within the inflatable as Ant Farm recognized. No longer is it inflate-able but inflate-us.

Working out the utopian and dystopian contradictions of inflatables is light-years away from wallowing in Junkspace, which seems to only inspire rigidity or lifelessness. At least we can enjoy an inflated capsule rather than being gasped out of our energy in Junkspace. An inflatable is about the air it surrounds — air that inspires. It is air that can be removed from any location, causing almost no damage to the land it was on. Now, an inflatable (and by extension, plastic) is not an idyllic scenario. In its plastic stuff, an inflatable succumbs to Koolhaas’ grudge against the “insidious half-life” of the enemy (aka Junkspace). Plastic is said to have a half-life of 58 to 1200 years. Insidious indeed. A half-life is the time it takes for a substance to be reduced by half. So, it is the rate of disappearance — it’s extinction. Again: I am not proposing we all buy everything made of plastic and invest in the chemical industry. I hope not to selfishly abuse others ( human and nonhuman alike) but recognize their presence and totality. Humans have reached what they desire most in creating plastic — basically, eternity. Then again, with all the emphasis on the end we have forgotten the beginning. We must choose to recognize the fertileness of plastic. There’s hope: the word “plastic” literally means “capable of change.” It seems that plastic stands on a platform of transformation. Perhaps it can be freed from its destructive confinement.

In the trailer for Space, Land, and Time, we learn that Ant Farm saw themselves as ants in an ant farm who break free from rigid, human-made structures. It is time to break out of Junkspace. I am not as interested in what inflatables should or should not house in the twenty-first century — be it homes, performances, events, government offices, restaurants, or hotels, or as a means to nomadic living for a few. Specificity is not the concern. The freeing of oneself is. We know for sure that our lives are a part of plastic, or plastic is a part of our lives. To put it bluntly, we must learn to coexist. Plastic can be toxic, yes. But plastic is not fake. Through HUMAN ingenuity was the material created. Even if machines create billions of plastic products, WE created machines. Plastic is not outside of us, both literally and figuratively. Our inflatables (and by extension, our plastic) could be as intimate as our phones, but not necessarily in a cyborg way. Plastic is not just a synthetic or artificial extension of us since WE created it. The matter is as much a part of us as our paintings and clothes, not an “enemy” that must be dominated and controlled. Plastic is intertwined in a way that to untwist it from us would be to destroy the way that we create meaning in our lives. And yes, plastic is flawed, and will be until we widely use biodegradable “plastic.” We perhaps must rethread in novel ways! The 2016 discovery by scientists in Japan of bacteria with the ability to decompose a certain kind of plastic gives us hope for the future: large-scale or local operations of bioengineered plastic-eating microorganisms. Here, we find a way to “compost” or “nurture” plastic and reconnect to our environment. After all, each moment of connection is of importance.