The Sentinel Self

The Time-eater is a bag found on the beach close to the artist's house, during the first months of developing the Sentinel Self. It is a whole ecosystem in itself, with various critters have found their homes on the bag. This bag became a symbol for the work itself: how worlds are all interconnected and how plastics permeate them all. The term Time-eater is taken from the philosopher Heather Davis who writes that “Plastic is the ultimate material of tempophagy, or time-eating, one that consumes the compressed bodies of ancient plants and animals, a process that took thousands of years, only to be transformed into a single-use take-out container"

(Heather Davis: Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures).

Creatures living on the Time-eater (Picture by Lisa Vaccari, Area Science Park)

Polyethylene (“PE”) may have started as an accident when Hans von Pechmann apparently first synthesized it back in 1898. (Aside: Pech happens to mean bad luck.) It later started to be produced by the British ICI Company in the UK, and since then polyethylene has never looked back. After several more tries by chemists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, polyethylene took off in the 1950s, promising the future would be both plastic and rich.

Ethylene is the main monomer used to make polyethylene. In order to achieve various subtypes of polyethylene, other small monomers can be included in the polymerization process.

The petrochemical industry is the source of polyethylene’s parent compound, ethylene. Ethylene is the most high volume production petrochemical in the world. Most of the ethylene produced globally is destined for polymerization into polyethylene of many types, such as high density polyethylene (HDPE) and low density polyethylene (LDPE). There are also many high tech versions of polyethylene, such as ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) which is so strong you can even make a bulletproof vest out of it. Or spacecraft.

PE is the most abundant plastic in the world. It used to be commonly used as a material for hip replacement, though doctors started noticing that fragments of polyethylene were released during use. That led to what they termed ‘polyethylene disease’, an inflammation of the hip due to the presence of polyethylene  microparticles. Contemporary hip and knee replacement surgeries now make use of more biocompatible materials.

PE's plastic recycling code is No. 2 or 4 depending on whether PE is high density (HDPE) or low density (LDPE). LDPE is often used for plastic bags.  HDPE is used for things like toys, shampoo bottles and for food contact packaging.

...featuring prominently in beach litter. Known to break down into microplastics and tour the planet.

PE is the most common and abundant plastic type in the world. Around a third of global plastics demand is for polyethylene. In the EU, 12.9 % of plastic demand is for high density PE varieties, 17.4% for low density PE varieties.

Detected in the bloodstreams humans, and cows and pigs for human consumption. Granulate polyethylene applied at up to 10% of product weight in shower gel formulations as an exfoliation function. Polyethylene microspheres added by the millions to anti-wrinkle cream for ‘optical blurring’ effect (microspheres in wrinkle grooves prevent light from casting shadows which make wrinkles more easily visible).

Featured in several movies such as Albatross (2017), A Plastic Ocean (2016), Bag It: Is your life too plastic?(2010). Currently art museums are scrambling to conserve some of the mid- 20^th century artworks made of polyethylene. As the materials in the artworks age, they tend to crack and sometimes crumble into microplastics.

https://plasticseurope.org/knowledge-hub/plastics-the-facts-2021/
https://www.beatthemicrobead.org/
https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/2022/07/80-of-cow-and-pig-meat-blood-and-milk-contains-plastic/
Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412022001258