Your New Frontier (Excerpt), 2025

Your New Frontier is an experimental animation that visualizes the scale of plastic waste exported from the United States, kilo by kilo. Layered atop this data-driven imagery is a soundscape composed of the same data, only sonified and rendered as a slow, resonant drone alongside cut-up audio from mid- twentieth-century corporate films.

These archival recordings once promoted plastic production with excitement and a sense of limitless potential, interwoven with references to war, economic expansion, and resource extraction.

The title phrase, drawn from one such film, encapsulates the colonial mindset that persists in how the United States offloads its waste onto other nations. Here, the frontier is no longer an unexplored land; it is the clean water and soil of countries burdened with the remnants of American consumption.

Your New Frontier was first presented as part of a larger body of work titled “Manifest Density” at Deep Space Drive-In in Denver CO. It has also been included in programming at Missouri State University and the Digerati Emergent Media Festival.