Jillian Leedy

Digesters

What is least integrated into visibility is considered the most obscene. 

Digesters explores the creation of digestive experience environments that reinvestigate the banality of defecation in order to pinpoint the marginalization of waste as a mode of disembodiment. Utilizing the public bathroom as a programmatic forefront and microalgae as a novel waste-processing backdrop, the project focuses on interfacing the street and the toilet to conflate both public and private spheres for the manifestation of new body politics, particularly those associated with disgust.

Similar to social media's identity-defining agenda, Digesters demands the body be on view for public consumption during one of its most vulnerable moments. We question the degree to which users are willingly removed from infrastructures of waste in the name of comfort, privatization, and aversion. Forcing novel engagement with the toilet by making defecation a piece of exciting, sensational, and provocative media, an active reengagement with public waste infrastructure can begin. 

This approach seeks to take seriously the possibility that design can subvert inherited cultural practices by physicalizing and encoding new socio-political perceptions for the built environment, particularly within Los Angeles.

What is least integrated into visibility is considered the most obscene.